You might need more space than is provided on the instance, or you might need a permanent storage solution. Amazon Elastic Block Store enables you to create volumes that can be mounted as block devices by Amazon EC2 instances.  EBS volumes behave like raw unformatted external block devices, and they persist past the life of an Amazon EC2 instance.

 

EBS Volumes are attached to an EC2 instance, as shown below, and provide persistent data storage.

 

 

 

For example, if you wanted 1 TB of usable storage with RAID redundancy for increased performance and data redundancy, you could configure:

 

- Two 1 TB EBS volumes, configured as RAID 1 mirrors

- Five 250 GB EBS volumes, configured as RAID 5 (four data, single parity)

- Seven 250 GB EBS volumes, configured as RAID 6 with a spare (four data, dual parity, one spare)

 

 

S3 Cloud Disks for Cloud Storage

 

You can also use S3 Cloud Disks to manage up to 4 petabytes of Amazon S3 cloud storage per device.  Learn more.

 

 

For more information, refer to the following sections.