Request Amazon EBS volume modifications
With Elastic Volumes, you can dynamically increase the size, increase or decrease the performance, and change the volume type of your Amazon EBS volumes without detaching them.
Use the following process when modifying a volume:
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(Optional) Before modifying a volume that contains valuable data, it is a best practice to create a snapshot of the volume in case you need to roll back your changes. For more information, see Create Amazon EBS snapshots.
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Request the volume modification.
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Monitor the progress of the volume modification. For more information, see Monitor the progress of Amazon EBS volume modifications.
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If the size of the volume was modified, extend the volume's file system to take advantage of the increased storage capacity. For more information, see Extend the file system after resizing an Amazon EBS volume.
Contents
Modify an EBS volume using Elastic Volumes
Considerations
Keep the following in mind when modifying volumes:
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After modifying a volume, you must wait at least six hours and ensure that the volume is in the
in-use
oravailable
state before you can modify the same volume. -
Modifying an EBS volume can take from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the configuration changes being applied. An EBS volume that is 1 TiB in size can typically take up to six hours to be modified. However, the same volume could take 24 hours or longer in other situations. The time it takes for volumes to be modified doesn't always scale linearly. Therefore, a larger volume might take less time, and a smaller volume might take more time.
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You can't cancel a volume modification request after it has been submitted.
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You can only increase volume size. You can't decrease volume size.
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You can increase or decrease volume performance.
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If you are not changing the volume type, then volume size and performance modifications must be within the limits of the current volume type. If you are changing the volume type, then volume size and performance modifications must be within the limits of the target volume type
-
If you change the volume type from
gp2
togp3
, and you do not specify IOPS or throughput performance, Amazon EBS automatically provisions either equivalent performance to that of the sourcegp2
volume, or the baselinegp3
performance, whichever is higher.For example, if you modify a 500 GiB
gp2
volume with 250 MiB/s throughput and 1500 IOPS togp3
without specifying IOPS or throughput performance, Amazon EBS automatically provisions thegp3
volume with 3000 IOPS (baselinegp3
IOPS) and 250 MiB/s (to match the sourcegp2
volume throughput).
To modify an EBS volume, use one of the following methods.
Modify an EBS volume if Elastic Volumes is not supported
If you are using a supported instance type, you can use Elastic Volumes to dynamically modify the size, performance, and volume type of your Amazon EBS volumes without detaching them.
If you cannot use Elastic Volumes but you need to modify the root (boot) volume, you must stop the instance, modify the volume, and then restart the instance.
After the instance has started, you can check the file system size to see if your instance recognizes the larger volume space. On Linux, use the df -h command to check the file system size.
[ec2-user ~]$
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 7.9G 943M 6.9G 12% / tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm
If the size does not reflect your newly expanded volume, you must extend the file system of your device so that your instance can use the new space. For more information, see Extend the file system after resizing an Amazon EBS volume.
With Windows instances, you might have to bring the volume online in order to use it. For more information, see Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use. You do not need to reformat the volume.
Initialize Elastic Volumes support (if needed)
Before you can modify a volume that was attached to an instance before November 3, 2016 23:40 UTC, you must initialize volume modification support using one of the following actions:
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Detach and attach the volume
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Stop and start the instance
Use one of the following procedures to determine whether your instances are ready for volume modification.