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

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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Considerations

  • 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.

  • Modification time is increased for volumes that are not fully initialized. For more information see Manually initialize the volumes after creation.

  • 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).

  • 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.

Limitations

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

  • You must increase the volume size. You can't decrease the volume size. 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).

  • 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.

  • 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 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. For more information, see Amazon EBS volume types

  • Nitro-based instances support volumes provisioned with up to 256,000 IOPS. Other instance types can be attached to volumes provisioned with up to 64,000 IOPS, but can achieve up to 32,000 IOPS.

  • You can't modify the volume type for 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.