Amazon EBS volume types
Overview
Amazon EBS provides multiple volume types that allow you to optimize storage performance and cost for a broad range of applications. These volume types are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases, virtual desktops and boot volumes, and HDD-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing.
SSD-based volumes include the highest performance EBS volumes (io2 Block Express and io1) for your most demanding transactional applications including SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2, and General Purpose SSD volumes (gp3 and gp2) that balance price and performance for transactional applications, including virtual desktops, test and development environments, and interactive gaming applications. HDD-based volumes include Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads and the lowest cost Cold HDD (sc1) for less frequently accessed data.
The following sections show use cases and performance characteristics of each EBS volume: