PlanetScale Metal is a scalable cloud OLTP database platform that offers effectively unlimited IOPS, making it ideal for high-I/O databases. It uses fast, local NVMe drives to achieve performance and price without compromising durability or scalability. Unlike network-attached storage products like Amazon EBS and Google Persistent Disk, Metal's directly-attached NVMe drives offer lower and more consistent read and write latency, higher throughput, and are generally less expensive. PlanetScale Metal is designed for critical workloads where microseconds matter, making it suitable for databases with constant, wide-ranging, random reads, massive write throughput, low tolerance for high latency, and other demanding use cases. With its powerful hardware and optimized architecture, Metal delivers performance at a cost that's often comparable to or even lower than equivalent configurations using Amazon Aurora or PlanetScale.