Analyzing physical storage
Performance defines how well a disk drive functions when accessing, retrieving, or saving data. There are quite a few yardsticks that can help to define the performance of the disk subsystem. For those of you who have worked with storage vendors while evaluating and purchasing high-end storage arrays, IOPS will be a very familiar term. Vendors like to throw this acronym around a lot and cite a storage system’s IOPS as one of its main selling points.
Input Output Operations per Second (IOPS) might very well be an entirely useless figure, unless it is coupled with other capabilities of a storage system, such as the response time, the read and write ratio, throughput, and block size. The IOPS figure is usually referred to as hero numbers, and it rarely provides any insight into the capabilities of the system unless it is coupled with other metrics. When you purchase a vehicle, you need to know the intricate details, such as its acceleration, fuel economy...
