Amazon EBS offers six volume types divided into two main categories: SSD-backed volumes (gp2, gp3, io1, io2) for transactional workloads requiring high IOPS, and HDD-backed volumes (st1, sc1) for sequential, throughput-intensive workloads. Each type differs in performance, cost, and use case.
Choosing the right EBS volume type is one of the most important cost and performance decisions in AWS architecture. SSD-based volumes are optimized for small, random I/O operations (databases, boot volumes), while HDD-based volumes are optimized for large, sequential I/O operations (big data, log processing). Only SSD types (gp2, gp3, io1, io2) can be used as boot/root volumes.
Full Name: General Purpose SSD v2
Size: 1 GiB – 16 TiB
Baseline IOPS: 3 IOPS per GiB (minimum 100, maximum 16,000 IOPS)
Throughput: Up to 250 MiB/s
Burst: Volumes under 1 TiB can burst to 3,000 IOPS using burst credits
Use Cases: Boot volumes, small-to-medium databases, development environments
Note: gp3 is newer, cheaper, and better — AWS recommends migrating from gp2 to gp3
Full Name: General Purpose SSD v3
Size: 1 GiB – 16 TiB
Baseline IOPS: 3,000 IOPS included at no extra cost (regardless of volume size)
Maximum IOPS: Up to 16,000 IOPS (provisioned independently of size)
Throughput: 125 MiB/s baseline, up to 1,000 MiB/s (provisioned independently)
Cost: 20% cheaper per GiB than gp2
Use Cases: Boot volumes, virtual desktops, medium databases, dev/test environments
Key Advantage: IOPS and throughput are configurable independently of storage size — unlike gp2
Full Name: Provisioned IOPS SSD v1
Size: 4 GiB – 16 TiB
Maximum IOPS: Up to 64,000 IOPS (on Nitro-based instances)
Maximum Throughput: 1,000 MiB/s
IOPS-to-GiB Ratio: Maximum 50:1 (e.g., 16,000 IOPS requires at least 320 GiB)
Multi-Attach: Supported — attach to up to 16 Nitro-based instances simultaneously
Use Cases: I/O-intensive databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB), latency-sensitive production workloads
Note: io2 is the newer, more durable successor to io1
Full Name: Provisioned IOPS SSD v2
Size: 4 GiB – 64 TiB (io2 Block Express)
Maximum IOPS: 64,000 IOPS (io2), up to 256,000 IOPS (io2 Block Express)
Maximum Throughput: 4,000 MiB/s (io2 Block Express)
Durability: 99.999% (five nines) vs 99.8–99.9% for io1 and gp-series
IOPS-to-GiB Ratio: Maximum 500:1 (10x better than io1)
Multi-Attach: Supported
Use Cases: Mission-critical databases, SAP HANA, large-scale Oracle/SQL Server, financial systems
Note: io2 Block Express is the highest-performance EBS volume available
Full Name: Throughput Optimized HDD
Size: 125 GiB – 16 TiB
Maximum Throughput: 500 MiB/s
Maximum IOPS: 500 IOPS (not suitable for random I/O)
Cost: Much cheaper per GiB than SSD volumes
Cannot be used as a boot volume
Use Cases: Big data (Hadoop, Spark), data warehouses, log processing, ETL pipelines, streaming workloads with large sequential reads
Full Name: Cold HDD
Size: 125 GiB – 16 TiB
Maximum Throughput: 250 MiB/s
Maximum IOPS: 250 IOPS
Cost: The lowest-cost EBS volume type
Cannot be used as a boot volume
Use Cases: Infrequently accessed cold data, archival storage, backups, disaster recovery data that rarely needs to be read