EBS Volume Types Overview

EBS offers 6 volume types across two categories: SSD and HDD. Each volume is characterized by three things: size, throughput, and IOPS (how many read/write operations per second the disk can handle).

Only gp2, gp3, io1, and io2 can be used as boot volumes (the disk that holds the OS). HDD types cannot be boot volumes.

SSD Types

General Purpose SSD — gp2 / gp3

Balanced price and performance for most workloads.

Use for: Boot volumes, virtual desktops, development and test environments, low-latency applications

Size: 1 GiB to 16 TiB

gp3:

• Baseline: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s throughput
• Can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s — independently of storage size
• More flexible than gp2

gp2:

• IOPS are linked to volume size — 3 IOPS per GiB
• Max IOPS: 16,000 (reached at ~5,334 GiB)
• Small volumes can burst to 3,000 IOPS

Provisioned IOPS SSD — io1 / io2 Block Express

Highest-performance SSD for workloads that need consistent, high IOPS or more than 16,000 IOPS.