Request modifications to your EBS volumes

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:

1. (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.

2. Request the volume modification.

3. Monitor the progress of the volume modification. For more information, see Monitor the progress of volume modifications.

4. 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 a Windows file system after resizing a volume.

Modify an EBS volume using Elastic Volumes

Considerations

Keep the following in mind when modifying volumes:

• You can't cancel a volume modification request after it has been submitted.

• You can only increase volume size. You can't decrease volume size.

• You can increase or decrease volume performance.

• 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 to gp3, and you do not specify IOPS or throughput performance, Amazon EBS automatically provisions either equivalent performance to that of the source gp2 volume, or the baseline gp3 performance, whichever is higher.

  For example, if you modify a 500 GiB gp2 volume with 250 MiB/s throughput and 1500 IOPS to gp3 without specifying IOPS or throughput performance, Amazon EBS automatically provisions the gp3 volume with 3000 IOPS (baseline gp3 IOPS) and 250 MiB/s (to match the source gp2 volume throughput).

To modify an EBS volume, use one of the following methods.

Console

To modify an EBS volume using the console

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Volumes.

3. Select the volume to modify and choose Actions, Modify volume.

4. The Modify volume screen displays the volume ID and the volume's current configuration, including type, size, IOPS, and throughput. Set new configuration values as follows:

   • To modify the type, choose a value for Volume type.

   • To modify the size, enter a new value for Size.

   • (gp3, io1, and io2 only) To modify the IOPS, enter a new value for IOPS.

   • (gp3 only) To modify the throughput, enter a new value for Throughput.

5. After you have finished changing the volume settings, choose Modify. When prompted for confirmation, choose Modify.

6. Important

   If you've increased the size of your volume, then you must also extend the volume's partition to make use of the additional storage capacity. For more information, see Extend a Windows file system after resizing a volume.

7. If you increase the size of an NVMe volume on an instance that does not have the AWS NVMe drivers, you must reboot the instance to enable Windows to see the new volume size. For more information about installing the AWS NVMe drivers, see AWS NVMe drivers for Windows instances.

AWS CLI

To modify an EBS volume using the AWS CLI

Use the modify-volume command to modify one or more configuration settings for a volume. For example, if you have a volume of type gp2 with a size of 100 GiB, the following command changes its configuration to a volume of type io1 with 10,000 IOPS and a size of 200 GiB.

aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-type io1 --iops 10000 --size 200 --volume-id vol-11111111111111111 

The following is example output:

{
    "VolumeModification": {
        "TargetSize": 200,
        "TargetVolumeType": "io1",
        "ModificationState": "modifying",
        "VolumeId": "vol-11111111111111111",
        "TargetIops": 10000,
        "StartTime": "2017-01-19T22:21:02.959Z",
        "Progress": 0,
        "OriginalVolumeType": "gp2",
        "OriginalIops": 300,
        "OriginalSize": 100
    }
}

Important

If you've increased the size of your volume, then you must also extend the volume's partition to make use of the additional storage capacity. For more information, see Extend a Windows file system after resizing a 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:

• Detach and attach the volume

• Stop and start the instance

Use one of the following procedures to determine whether your instances are ready for volume modification.

Console

To determine whether your instances are ready using the console

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2. On the navigation pane, choose Instances.

3. Choose the Show/Hide Columns icon (the gear). Select the Launch time attribute column and then choose Confirm.

4. Sort the list of instances by the Launch Time column. For each instance that was started before the cutoff date, choose the Storage tab and check the Attachment time column to see when its volumes were attached.

AWS CLI

To determine whether your instances are ready using the CLI

Use the following describe-instances command to determine whether the volume was attached before November 3, 2016 23:40 UTC.

aws ec2 describe-instances --query "Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,LaunchTime<='2016-11-01',BlockDeviceMappings[*][Ebs.AttachTime<='2016-11-01']]" --output text

The first line of the output for each instance shows its ID and whether it was started before the cutoff date (True or False). The first line is followed by one or more lines that show whether each EBS volume was attached before the cutoff date (True or False). In the following example output, you must initialize volume modification for the first instance because it was started before the cutoff date and its root volume was attached before the cutoff date. The other instances are ready because they were started after the cutoff date.

i-e905622e              True
True
i-719f99a8              False
True
i-006b02c1b78381e57     False
False
False
i-e3d172ed              False
True

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.

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 a Windows file system after resizing a volume.

You may have to bring the volume online in order to use it. For more information, see Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Windows. You do not need to reformat the volume.