AWS Getting Started - Storage

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Last updated: Sept 29, 2021 by Tom Sheffield (Unlicensed)

SoftNAS can leverage the varieties of EBS volumes available on AWS. It can, however, introduce some complexities when determining your requirements. As performance is based not only on the instance size selected but also the storage characteristics, leveraging different types of storage in the same solution will affect your performance.

EBS Volumes

To determine what this effect might be, we must first understand the individual performance characteristics of each storage type. The table below outlines the available block storage options for Amazon Web Services:


Solid-State Drives (SSD)

Hard disk Drives (HDD)

Volume Type

General Purpose SSD

(gp2 & gp3)

Provisioned IOPS SSD

(io1 & io2)

Throughput Optimized HDD

(st1)

Cold HDD

(sc1)

Description

General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads

Highest-performance SSD volume designed for mission-critical applications

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
  • Throughput-oriented storage for large volumes of data that is infrequently accessed
  • Scenarios where the lowest storage cost is important



Volume Size

1 GiB - 16 TiB

4 GiB - 16 TiB

500 GiB - 16 TiB

500 GiB - 16 TiB

Max. IOPS**/Volume

10,000

20,000

500

250

Max. Throughput/Volume

160 MiB/s

320 MiB/s

500 MiB/s

250 MiB/s

Max. IOPS/Instance

65,000

65,000

65,000

65,000

Max. Throughput/Instance

1,250 MiB/s

1,250 MiB/s

1,250 MiB/s

1,250 MiB/s

Dominant Performance Attribute

IOPS

IOPS

MiB/s

MiB/s


For more information on EBS volume types, click the following links: