Amazon EBS volume types - Amazon EBS
Solid state drive (SSD) volumesHard disk drive (HDD) volumesPrevious generation volumes

Amazon EBS volume types

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 3 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 workloads

  • Virtual desktops

  • Medium-sized, single-instance databases

  • Low-latency interactive applications

  • Boot volumes

  • Development 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 4 4 GiB - 16 TiB
Max IOPS 16,000 (64 KiB I/O 6) 16,000 (16 KiB I/O 6) 256,000 5 (16 KiB I/O 6) 64,000 (16 KiB I/O 6)
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 an instances built on the Nitro System. Volumes created before December 6, 2017 that have not been modified since creation might not reach full performance unless you modify the volume.

3 All io2 volumes created after November 21, 2023 are io2 Block Express volumes. io2 volumes created before November 21, 2023 can be converted to io2 Block Express volumes by modifying the IOPS or size of the volume.

4 Volumes over 16 TiB in size can only be attached to instances built on the Nitro System.

5 Volumes over 64,000 IOPS can only be attached to instances built on the Nitro System. Volumes up to 64,000 IOPS can be attached to non-Nitro instances, but they can only achieve up to 32,000 IOPS.

6 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.