With AWS EBS gp3 volumes, IOPs and throughput can be provisioned separately from EBS storage size. While Atlas now uses gp3 volumes and provides a base throughput of 3,000 IOPs, higher throughputs are still directly tied to disk size. We run IO-intensive workloads that require high throughput, and we have to severely over-size disks to get the needed throughput. We don't require the extra-low latency of provisioned IOPs (which is much more expensive than over-provisioning storage). According to the linked AWS documentation below, if the M60 instance size is running on an ec2 m5.4xlarge instance type, it can support a max EBS bandwidth of 593.75MB/s and 18,750 IOPs. M5.8xlarge can support 800MB/s and 30,000 IOPs. Newer generations support even higher levels. Individual EBS volumes can support up to 1,000 MB/s and 16,000 IOPs each. Information on AWS EBS can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/general-purpose/ Details of EBS throughput by instance type can be found at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-optimized.html