Introducing the Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volume type
We are pleased to introduce the Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volume type. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are our new default Amazon EBS storage option and are suitable for a broad range of use cases, including small to medium-sized databases, development and test environments, and boot volumes.
Backed by Solid-State Drives (SSDs), General Purpose (SSD) volumes provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS/GB. General Purpose (SSD) volumes offer the same five nines of availability and durable snapshot capabilities as other volume types. Pricing and performance for General Purpose (SSD) volumes are simple and predictable. You pay for each GB of storage you provision, and there are no additional charges for I/O performed on a volume. Prices start as low as $0.10/GB.
You can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types to best meet the needs of your workloads: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are suitable for a broad range of workloads, including small to medium-sized databases, development and test environments, and boot volumes. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes offer storage with consistent and low-latency performance, are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases, and allow you to choose the level of performance you need. Magnetic volumes, formerly known as Standard volumes, provide the lowest cost per gigabyte of all Amazon EBS volume types and are ideal for workloads where data is accessed infrequently and applications where the lowest storage cost is important.
It’s easy to create a new General Purpose (SSD) volume with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. If you have an existing volume you would like to migrate to a General Purpose (SSD) volume, you can simply take a snapshot, and use the snapshot to create a new General Purpose (SSD) volume.
To learn more please see the Amazon EBS details page.