Amazon EBS volume types - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

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.

  • Solid state drives (SSD) — 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:

  • Hard disk drives (HDD) — Optimized for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput. HDD-backed volume types include Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD volumes.

  • Previous generation — Hard disk drives that you can use for workloads with small datasets where data is accessed infrequently and performance is not of primary importance. We recommend that you consider a current generation volume type instead. For more information, see Previous generation Magnetic volumes.

Tip

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 on Windows instances.

For more information about pricing, see Amazon EBS Pricing.

Volume types