Modify an Amazon EBS volume using Elastic Volumes operations - Amazon EBS
Limitations

Modify an Amazon EBS volume using Elastic Volumes operations

With Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes, you can increase the volume size, change the volume type, or adjust the performance of your EBS volumes. If your instance supports Elastic Volumes, you can do so without detaching the volume or restarting the instance. This enables you to continue using your application while the changes take effect.

There is no charge to modify the configuration of a volume. You are charged for the new volume configuration after volume modification starts. For more information, see the Amazon EBS Pricing page.

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Limitations

  • There are limits to the maximum aggregated storage that can be requested across volume modifications. For more information, see Amazon EBS service quotas in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.

  • After modifying a volume, you must wait at least six hours and ensure that the volume is in the in-use or available state before you can modify the same volume.

  • Modifying an EBS volume can take from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the configuration changes being applied. An EBS volume that is 1 TiB in size can typically take up to six hours to be modified. However, the same volume could take 24 hours or longer in other situations. The time it takes for volumes to be modified doesn't always scale linearly. Therefore, a larger volume might take less time, and a smaller volume might take more time.

  • If you encounter an error message while attempting to modify an EBS volume, or if you are modifying an EBS volume attached to a previous-generation instance type, take one of the following steps:

    • For a non-root volume, detach the volume from the instance, apply the modifications, and then re-attach the volume.

    • For a root volume, stop the instance, apply the modifications, and then restart the instance.

  • Modification time is increased for volumes that are not fully initialized. For more information see Initialize Amazon EBS volumes.

  • The new volume size can't exceed the supported capacity of its file system and partitioning scheme. For more information, see Amazon EBS volume constraints.

  • If you modify the volume type of a volume, the size and performance must be within the limits of the target volume type. For more information, see Amazon EBS volume types

  • You can't decrease the size of an EBS volume. However, you can create a smaller volume and then migrate your data to it using an application-level tool such as rsync (Linux instances) or robocopy (Windows instances).

  • io2 volumes attached to instances built on the Nitro System support sizes up to 64 TiB and IOPS up to 256,000 IOPS. io2 volumes attached to other instances support sizes up to 16 TiB and IOPS up to 64,000, but can achieve performance up to 32,000 IOPS only.

  • You can't modify the volume type of Multi-Attach enabled io2 volumes.

  • You can't modify the volume type, size, or Provisioned IOPS of Multi-Attach enabled io1 volumes.

  • A root volume of type io1, io2, gp2, gp3, or standard can't be modified to an st1 or sc1 volume, even if it is detached from the instance.

  • If the volume was attached before November 3, 2016 23:40 UTC, you must initialize Elastic Volumes support. For more information, see Initializing Elastic Volumes Support.

  • While m3.medium instances fully support volume modification, m3.large, m3.xlarge, and m3.2xlarge instances might not support all volume modification features.