Comparison of Amazon EBS Volume Types

The following table  from the AWS official documentation describes the use cases and performance characteristics for each Amazon EBS volume type:

	Solid-State Drives (SSD)		Hard disk Drives (HDD)
Volume Type	General Purpose SSD (gp2)*	Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)	Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)	Cold HDD (sc1)
Description	General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads	Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads	Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads	Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
Use Cases	Recommended for most workloads System boot volumes Virtual desktops Low-latency interactive apps Development and test environments	Critical business applications that require sustained IOPS performance, or more than 10,000 IOPS or 160 MiB/s of throughput per volume Large database workloads, such as: MongoDB Cassandra Microsoft SQL Server MySQL PostgreSQL Oracle	Streaming workloads requiring consistent, fast throughput at a low price Big data Data warehouses Log processing Cannot be a boot volume	Throughput-oriented storage for large volumes of data that is infrequently accessed Scenarios where the lowest storage cost is important Cannot be a boot volume
API Name	gp2	io1	st1	sc1
Volume Size	1 GiB - 16 TiB	4 GiB - 16 TiB	500 GiB - 16 TiB	500 GiB - 16 TiB
Max. IOPS**/Volume	10,000	32,000***	500	250
Max. Throughput/Volume	160 MiB/s****	500 MiB/s†	500 MiB/s	250 MiB/s
Max. IOPS/Instance	80,000	80,000	80,000	80,000
Max. Throughput/Instance††	1,750 MiB/s	1,750 MiB/s	1,750 MiB/s	1,750 MiB/s
Dominant Performance Attribute	IOPS	IOPS	MiB/s	MiB/s

* Default volume type for EBS volumes created from the console is gp2.

** gp2/io1 based on 16 KiB I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MiB I/O size

*** io1 volumes created in regions ap-northeast-3 and us-gov-west-1 are subject to a 20,000 IOPS limit.

**** General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes have a throughput limit between 128 MiB/s and 160 MiB/s depending on volume size. Volumes greater than 170 GiB up to 214 GiB deliver a maximum throughput of 160 MiB/s if burst credits are available. Volumes above 214 GiB deliver 160 MiB/s irrespective of burst credits.

† An io1 volume created before 12/6/2017 will not achieve this throughput until modified in some way.

†† To achieve this throughput, you must have an instance that supports it.