Make instance store volume available for use on an EC2 instance - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Make instance store volume available for use on an EC2 instance

After you launch an instance with attached instance store volumes, you must mount the volumes before you can access them.

You can format volumes with the file system of your choice after you launch your instance.

You can view and mount the instance store volumes as described in the following procedure.

To make an instance store volume available on Linux

  1. Connect to the instance using an SSH client. For more information, see Connect to your Linux instance using SSH.

  2. Use the df -h command to view the volumes that are formatted and mounted.

    $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        3.8G   72K  3.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs           3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/nvme0n1p1  7.9G  1.2G  6.6G  15% /

  3. Use the lsblk to view any volumes that were mapped at launch but not formatted and mounted.

    $ lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1       259:1    0    8G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1   259:2    0    8G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p128 259:3    0    1M  0 part
nvme1n1       259:0    0 69.9G  0 disk

  4. To format and mount an instance store volume that was mapped only, do the following:

    1. Create a file system on the device using the mkfs command.

      $ sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/nvme1n1

    2. Create a directory on which to mount the device using the mkdir command.

      $ sudo mkdir /data

    3. Mount the device on the newly created directory using the mount command.

      $ sudo mount /dev/nvme1n1 /data

For Windows instances, we reformat the instance store volumes with the NTFS file system.

You can view the instance store volumes using Windows Disk Management. For more information, see List non-NVMe disks.

To manually mount an instance store volume

  1. Choose Start, enter Computer Management, and then press Enter.

  2. In left-hand panel, choose Disk Management.

  3. If you are prompted to initialize the volume, choose the volume to initialize, select the required partition type depending on your use case, and then choose OK.

  4. In the list of volumes, right-click the volume to mount, and then choose New Simple Volume.

  5. On the wizard, choose Next.

  6. On the Specify Volume Size screen, choose Next to use the maximum volume size. Alternatively, choose a volume size that is between the minimum and maximum disk space.

  7. On the Assign a Drive Letter or Path screen, do one of the following, and choose Next.

    • To mount the volume with a drive letter, choose Assign the following drive letter and then choose the drive letter to use.

    • To mount the volume as a folder, choose Mount in the following empty NTFS folder and then choose Browse to create or select the folder to use.

    • To mount the volume without a drive letter or path, choose Do not assign a drive letter or drive path.

  8. On the Format Partition screen, specify whether or not to format the volume. If you choose to format the volume, choose the required file system and unit size, and specify a volume label.

  9. Choose Next, Finish.

For instructions on how to mount an attached volume automatically after reboot, see Automatically mount an attached volume after reboot in the Amazon EBS User Guide.