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AWS Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Study Notes/
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Amazon EBS/
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Amazon EBS – Volume Types
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Amazon EBS – Volume Types

Amazon EBS offers six volume types, each optimized for different performance and cost requirements:
  • gp2 / gp3 (SSD) – General Purpose SSD for balanced price/performance across many workloads.
  • io1 / io2 Block Express (SSD) – High-performance SSD for mission-critical, low-latency, or high-throughput workloads.
  • st1 (HDD) – Low-cost HDD for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads.
  • sc1 (HDD) – Lowest-cost HDD for infrequently accessed workloads.
EBS volumes are defined by size, throughput, and IOPS.
Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 Block Express can serve as boot volumes.

General Purpose SSD (gp2 / gp3)

Cost-effective storage with low latency, ideal for system boot volumes, virtual desktops, and dev/test environments.
Size range: 1 GiB – 16 TiB.
  • gp3:
    • Baseline: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s throughput.
    • Scalable up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s.
    • IOPS and throughput can be set independently.
  • gp2:
    • Small volumes can burst to 3,000 IOPS.
    • IOPS tied to size: 3 IOPS per GiB, max 16,000 IOPS.
    • Max IOPS reached at 5,334 GiB.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 / io2 Block Express)

Designed for critical workloads needing consistent high IOPS, such as databases.
  • io1:
    • Size: 4 GiB – 16 TiB.
    • Max PIOPS: 64,000 (Nitro) / 32,000 (other).
    • IOPS independent of size.
  • io2 Block Express:
    • Size: 4 GiB – 64 TiB.
    • Sub-millisecond latency.
    • Max PIOPS: 256,000 with up to 1,000:1 IOPS-to-GiB ratio.
    • Supports EBS Multi-Attach.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD) – st1 / sc1

Cannot be used as boot volumes.
Size range: 125 GiB – 16 TiB.
  • st1 (Throughput Optimized HDD):
    • For Big Data, data warehouses, and log processing.
    • Max throughput: 500 MiB/s.
    • Max IOPS: 500.
  • sc1 (Cold HDD):
    • For infrequently accessed, cost-sensitive data.
    • Max throughput: 250 MiB/s.
    • Max IOPS: 250.
 
Addition:
General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes offer cost-effective storage that is ideal for a broad range of workloads. These volumes deliver single-digit millisecond latencies and the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for an extended duration. Between a minimum of 100 IOPS (at 33.33 GiB and below) and a maximum of 16,000 IOPS (at 5,334 GiB and above), baseline performance scales linearly at 3 IOPS per GiB of volume size. AWS designs gp2 volumes to deliver a provisioned performance of 99% uptime. A gp2 volume can range in size from 1 GiB to 16 TiB.
Therefore, gp2 is the right choice as it is more cost-effective than io1, and it also allows a burst in performance when needed.