How is that possible? How can a disk drive suddenly do more random
IOPs at the cost of latency? The trick lies in that the storage
subsystem can be smart and look at the queue and then order the I/Os
in such a way that the actual access pattern to disk will be more
serialised. So a disk can serve more IOPS/s at the cost of an increase
in average latency. Depending on the achieved latency and the
performance requirements of the application layer, this can be
acceptable or not.
Latency is how fast a single I/O-request is handled.
A storage subsystem that can handle 1000 IOPS with an average latency
of 10ms may get better application performance than a subsystem that
can handle 5000 IOPS with an average latency of 50ms. Especially if
the application is sensitive to latency, such as a database service.