Amazon EBS Volume Types

What is Amazon EBS Volume?

An Amazon EBS volume is a durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to your instances.

After a volume is attached to an instance, it can be used as a physical hard drive. You can dynamically increase size, modify the provisioned IOPS capacity, and change volume type on live production volumes.

Amazon EBS Volume Types

General Purpose SSD — Provides a balance of price and performance.

Provisioned IOPS SSD — Provides high performance for mission-critical, low-latency, or high-throughput workloads.

Throughput Optimized HDD — A low-cost HDD designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads.

Cold HDD — The lowest-cost HDD design for less frequently accessed workloads.

General Purpose SSD volumes (gp3)

General Purpose SSD (gp3) volumes deliver a consistent baseline rate of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s, included with the price of storage.

You can provision additional IOPS (up to 16,000) and throughput (up to 1,000 MiB/s) for an additional cost.

Use Cases: Low-latency interactive apps & Development and test environments

General Purpose SSD volumes (gp2)

General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes deliver single-digit millisecond latencies and the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time. Between a minimum of 100 IOPS and a maximum of 16,000 IOPS, baseline performance scales linearly at 3 IOPS per GiB of volume size.

Use Cases: Low-latency interactive apps & Development and test environments

Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes (io1 and io2)

Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes use a consistent IOPS rate, which you specify when you create the volume, and Amazon EBS delivers the provisioned performance 99.9 percent of the time.

io1 volumes are designed to provide 99.8 to 99.9 percent volume durability with an annual failure rate (AFR) no higher than 0.2 percent, that is a maximum of two volume failures per 1,000 running volumes over a one-year period.

io2 volumes are designed to provide 99.999 percent volume durability with an AFR no higher than 0.001 percent, that is a single volume failure per 100,000 running volumes over a one-year period.

Use Cases:

• Workloads that require sustained IOPS performance or more than 16,000 IOPS

• I/O-intensive database workloads

Throughput Optimized HDD volumes (st1)

Throughput Optimized HDD volumes provide low-cost magnetic storage that defines performance in terms of throughput rather than IOPS.

Throughput Optimized HDD volumes, though similar to Cold HDD volumes, are designed to support frequently accessed data.

This volume type is optimized for workloads involving large, sequential I/O, and it is recommended that customers with workloads performing small, random I/O use gp2.

Use Cases: Large, sequential workloads such as Amazon EMR, ETL, data warehouses, and log processing.

Cold HDD volumes (sc1)

Cold HDD volumes provide low-cost magnetic storage that defines performance in terms of throughput rather than IOPS.

Cold HDD volumes, though similar to Throughput Optimized HDD volumes, are designed to support infrequently accessed data.

Use Cases: Large, sequential, cold-data workloads. If you require infrequent access to your data and are looking to save costs, these volumes provide inexpensive block storage.

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Amazon EBS Volume Types

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