CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-services
DirtyMikeAndTheBoys
DirtyMikeAndTheBoys

Reputation: 1077

AWS Storage Types

I am trying to understand the fundamental differences between several different types of storage available on AWS, specifically:

I am stunned to find no clear definition of each of these in the AWS docs, so I ask: How are these storage types different, and what use cases/scenarios are appropriate for each?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 693

Answers (2)

Zach S
Zach S

Reputation: 109

Instance storage options:

Magnetic - Slowest/cheapest magnetic disk backed storage

SSD - Faster/more expensive solid state backed storage

"Provisioned IOPS" - FastEST/most expensive but guaranteed (at the physical level) speed of input/output operations per second.

from Google:

IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced eye-ops) is a common performance measurement used to benchmark computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN).

This link has more fine grained details on SSD/Magnetic disk comparisons, granted it seems geared towards databases.

Snapshots are backups and are entirely separate from AWS 'hard drive' offerings.

Upvotes: 2

jarmod
jarmod

Reputation: 78573

You're referring to Elastic Block Store (EBS). EBS provides persistent block level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. EBS volumes come in 3 types:

  1. Provisioned IOPS (SSD)
  2. General Purpose (SSD)
  3. Magnetic

Each type has different performance characteristics and costs. See EBS volume types for more details. The list above is ordered from high to low, by both price and by potential IOPS.

EBS snapshots are something else entirely. All EBS volumes, regardless of volume type, can be snapshotted and durably stored.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions