Understanding EBS Volume Types in AWS

Overview

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers six different volume types, categorized into Solid State Drive (SSD) volumes and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) volumes. Each type is optimized for specific workloads, balancing cost, performance, throughput, and latency.

Categories of EBS Volumes

1. General Purpose SSD: Balanced price and performance
   • 🔹 gp2 (legacy)
   • 🔹 gp3 (newer, more flexible)
2. Provisioned IOPS SSD: High-performance for latency-sensitive workloads
   • 🔹 io1 (up to 64,000 IOPS)
   • 🔹 io2 / io2 Block Express (up to 256,000 IOPS, best performance)
3. HDD (Magnetic Storage): Optimized for throughput-intensive workloads
   • 🔹 st1 (Throughput Optimized HDD)
   • 🔹 sc1 (Cold HDD, lowest-cost option)

General Purpose SSD: gp2 vs. gp3

These volumes are designed for everyday workloads such as system boot volumes, virtual desktops, and test environments.

🔹 gp2 (Legacy General Purpose SSD)

• Size range: 1GB – 16TB
• IOPS performance:
  • Burst up to 3,000 IOPS for small volumes
  • Scales with size: 3 IOPS per GB (e.g., 100GB = 300 IOPS)
  • Maximum: 16,000 IOPS (requires 5,334GB volume size)
• Throughput: Up to 250 MB/s
• Performance is tied to volume size.

🔹 gp3 (Newer General Purpose SSD)

• Size range: 1GB – 16TB
• Baseline IOPS: 3,000
• Maximum IOPS: 16,000 (configurable independently of size)
• Baseline throughput: 125 MB/s