IOPS · Input/Output Operations Per Second
The rate of read/write operations a storage system handles; metadata-heavy AI loads are often IOPS-bound, not bandwidth-bound.
Current numbers
~28 / 14 GB/sMicron 9650 (first mass-production PCIe 6.0 x4 enterprise SSD; E1.S and E3.S; ~5.5M IOPS), vendor-rated sequential read/write