Volumen Types | Notion

AWS EBS Volume Types

General Purpose SSD Volumes

Feature	General Purpose SSD (gp2)	General Purpose SSD (gp3)	Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)	Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express)
Volume type	gp2	gp3	io1	io2 Block Express
Durability	99.8% - 99.9%	99.8% - 99.9%	99.8% - 99.9%	99.999%
Use Cases	Transactional workloads Virtual desktops Medium-sized, single-instance databases Low-latency interactive applications Boot volumes Development and test environments	Transactional workloads Virtual desktops Medium-sized, single-instance databases Low-latency interactive applications Boot volumes Development and test environments	Sustained IOPS performance More than 16,000 IOPS I/O-intensive database workloads	Sub-millisecond latency Sustained IOPS performance More than 64,000 IOPS or 1,000 MiB/s of throughput
Volume Size	1 GiB - 16 TiB	1 GiB - 16 TiB	4 GiB - 16 TiB	4 GiB - 64 TiB
Max IOPS per volume	16,000 (16 KiB I/O)	16,000 (64 KiB I/O)	64,000 (16 KiB I/O)	256,000 (16 KiB I/O)
Max Throughput per volume	250 MiB/s	1,000 MiB/s	1,000 MiB/s	4,000 MiB/s
Amazon EBS Multi-attach	Not supported	Not supported	Supported	Supported
NVMe Reservations	Not supported	Not supported	Not Supported	Supported
Boot Volume	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported

gp2
- Cost-effective, low-latency storage
- Use cases: Boot volumes, development/test environments, virtual desktops
- Size range: 1GB - 16TB
- IOPS linked to volume size (3 IOPS per GB) up to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS
gp3
- Newer generation, baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput
- IOPS (up to 16,000) and throughput (up to 1,000 MB/s) can be adjusted independently of volume size

Provisioned IOPS SSD Volumes

io1
- For I/O-intensive, mission-critical applications
- Size range: 4GB - 16TB
- Supports up to 64,000 IOPS (Nitro instances) or 32,000 IOPS (other instance types)
- Can increase IOPS independently of volume size
- The maximum ratio of provisioned IOPS to the requested volume size (in GiB) is 50:1. So, for a 100 GiB volume size, the max IOPS possible is 100*50 = 5000 IOPS.
io2 (Block Express)
- Offers extremely high performance, sub-millisecond latency
- Size range: 4GB – 64TB
- Supports up to 256,000 IOPS
- IOPS to GB ratio of 1,000:1

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1)

Feature	Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)	Cold HDD (sc1)
Volume type	st1	sc1
Durability	99.8% - 99.9%	99.8% - 99.9%
Use Cases	Big data Data warehouses, Log processing	Infrequently accessed data, Lowest storage cost scenarios
Volume Size	125 GiB - 16 TiB	125 GiB - 16 TiB
Max IOPS per volume (1 MiB I/O)	500	250
Max Throughput per volume	500 MiB/s	250 MiB/s
Amazon EBS Multi-attach	Not supported	Not supported
Boot Volume	Not supported	Not supported

Cannot be used as boot volumes
Size range: up to 16TB
Use cases:
- st1 - Big data, log processing, data warehousing (500 MB/s max throughput, 500 max IOPS)
- sc1 - Infrequently accessed data, archiving (250 MB/s max throughput, 250 max IOPS)

Key Points

General purpose SSDs (gp2/gp3) are appropriate for most typical workloads.
Choose provisioned IOPS (io1/io2) for database workloads or when 16,000+ IOPS is needed.
Throughput optimized HDD (st1) is for high-throughput needs; cold HDD (sc1) is for less frequent access with a focus on cost savings.

Important Note: Details like specific IOPS and throughput numbers are less important for the exam compared to understanding the high-level characteristics and use cases of each volume type.

Extras:

Here's why io2 Block Express and io1 are excellent choices for databases: