Amazon EBS volume types - Amazon EBS (original) (raw)
Amazon EBS provides the following volume types, which differ in performance characteristics and price, so that you can tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your applications.
Important
There are several factors that can affect the performance of EBS volumes, such as instance configuration, I/O characteristics, and workload demand. To fully use the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, use EBS–optimized instances. For more information about getting the most out of your EBS volumes, see Amazon EBS volume performance.
For more information about pricing, see Amazon EBS Pricing.
Volume types
Solid state drive (SSD) volumes
SSD-backed volumes are optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS. SSD-backed volume types include General Purpose SSD and Provisioned IOPS SSD. The following is a summary of the use cases and characteristics of SSD-backed volumes.
| Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD volumes | Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume type | gp3 | gp2 | io2 Block Express | io1 |
| Durability | 99.8% - 99.9% durability (0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate) | 99.999% durability (0.001% annual failure rate) | 99.8% - 99.9% durability (0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate) | |
| Use cases | Transactional workloadsVirtual desktopsMedium-sized, single-instance databasesLow-latency interactive applicationsBoot volumesDevelopment and test environments | Workloads that require: Sub-millisecond latency Sustained IOPS performance More than 64,000 IOPS or 1,000 MiB/s of throughput | Workloads that require sustained IOPS performance or more than 16,000 IOPS I/O-intensive database workloads | |
| Volume size | 1 GiB - 16 TiB | 4 GiB - 64 TiB 3 | 4 GiB - 16 TiB | |
| Max IOPS | 16,000 (64 KiB I/O 5) | 16,000 (16 KiB I/O 5) | 256,000 4 (16 KiB I/O 5) | 64,000 (16 KiB I/O 5) |
| Max throughput | 1,000 MiB/s | 250 MiB/s 1 | 4,000 MiB/s | 1,000 MiB/s 2 |
| Amazon EBS Multi-attach | Not supported | Supported | ||
| NVMe reservations | Not supported | Supported | Not supported | |
| Boot volume | Supported |
1 The throughput limit is between 128 MiB/s and 250 MiB/s, depending on the volume size. For more information, see gp2 volume performance. Volumes created before December 3, 2018 that have not been modified since creation might not reach full performance unless you modify the volume.
2 To achieve maximum throughput of 1,000 MiB/s, the volume must be provisioned with 64,000 IOPS and it must be attached to a Nitro-based instance. Volumes created before December 6, 2017 that have not been modified since creation might not reach full performance unless you modify the volume.
3 Nitro-based instances support volumes up to 64 TiB in size. Other instance types support volumes up to 16 TiB in size.
4 Nitro-based instances support volumes provisioned with up to 256,000 IOPS. Other instance types can be attached to volumes provisioned with up to 64,000 IOPS, but can achieve up to 32,000 IOPS.
5 Represents the required I/O size to reach maximum IOPS within the volume's throughput limit.
For more information about the SSD-backed volume types, see the following:
Hard disk drive (HDD) volumes
HDD-backed volumes are optimized for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput. HDD volume types include Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD. The following is a summary of the use cases and characteristics of HDD-backed volumes.
| Throughput Optimized HDD volumes | Cold HDD volumes | |
|---|---|---|
| Volume type | st1 | sc1 |
| Durability | 99.8% - 99.9% durability (0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate) | |
| Use cases | Big data Data warehouses Log processing | Throughput-oriented storage for data that is infrequently accessed Scenarios where the lowest storage cost is important |
| Volume size | 125 GiB - 16 TiB | |
| Max IOPS per volume (1 MiB I/O) | 500 | 250 |
| Max throughput per volume | 500 MiB/s | 250 MiB/s |
| Amazon EBS Multi-attach | Not supported | |
| Boot volume | Not supported |
For more information about the Hard disk drives (HDD) volumes, see Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD volumes.
Previous generation volumes
Magnetic (standard) volumes are previous generation volumes that are backed by magnetic drives. They are suited for workloads with small datasets where data is accessed infrequently and performance is not of primary importance. These volumes deliver approximately 100 IOPS on average, with burst capability of up to hundreds of IOPS, and they can range in size from 1 GiB to 1 TiB.
Tip
Magnetic is a previous generation volume type. If you need higher performance or performance consistency than previous-generation volumes can provide, we recommend using one of the newer volume types.
The following table describes previous-generation EBS volume types.
| Magnetic | |
|---|---|
| Volume type | standard |
| Use cases | Workloads where data is infrequently accessed |
| Volume size | 1 GiB-1 TiB |
| Max IOPS per volume | 40–200 |
| Max throughput per volume | 40–90 MiB/s |
| Boot volume | Supported |
For more information, see Previous Generation Volumes.