EBS Volume Types and Snapshots
AWS offers a variety of EBS volume types. Learn about their features and how snapshots work.
We'll cover the following
EBS volume types
SSD, General Purpose – gp2
- Baseline of 3 IOPS per GiB with a minimum of 100 IOPS
- Burst up to 3000 IOPS (for volumes >= 334GB)
- Up to 16,000 IOPS per volume
- AWS designs gp2 volumes to deliver 90% of the provisioned performance 99% of the time. A gp2 volume can range in size from 1 GiB to 16 TiB.
SSD, Provisioned IOPS – i01
- More than 16,000 IOPS
- Up to 64,000 IOPS per volume
- Up to 50 IOPS per GiB
- Amazon EBS delivers the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9 percent of the time.
HDD, Throughput Optimized – st1
- Frequently accessed throughput intensive workloads with large datasets and large I/O sizes, such as MapReduce, Kafka, log processing, data warehouse, and ETL workloads
- Throughput measured in MB/s and includes the ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume
- Cannot be a boot volume
HDD, Cold – sc1
- Lowest cost storage — cannot be a boot volume
- Less frequently accessed workloads with large, cold datasets
- These volumes can burst up to 80 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 12 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 250 MB/s per volume.
Magnetic (Standard)
- Cheap, infrequently accessed storage that can be a boot volume
- Delivers around 100 IOPS on average
EBS optimized instances
- Dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O
- EBS-optimized instances are designed for use with all EBS volume types.
- Max bandwidth: 400 Mbps – 12000 Mbps
- IOPS: 3000 – 65000
- GP-SSD within 10% of baseline and burst performance 99.9% of the time
- PIOPS within 10% of baseline and burst performance 99.9% of the time
- Additional hourly fee
- Available for select instance types
- Some instance types have EBS-optimized enabled by default.
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