Difficulty: Medium
Description
These io1 volumes are provisioned within gp3 limits. gp3 supports up to 80,000 IOPS and includes 3,000 IOPS at no extra charge, so it delivers the same performance for a fraction of the io1 price.
Selection Criteria
The EBS volume uses the io1 storage type.
The EBS volume has been in active use (
in-use) for the last 7 days.The EBS volume has provisioned IOPS of less than 80,000 (gp3 maximum IOPS limit).
The EBS volume has only one attachment (multi-attach io1 volumes are not eligible for migration to gp3).
Expected Saving
Up to ~87% reduction on EBS storage and IOPS costs depending on volume size and provisioned IOPS.
Cost component | io1 (us-east-1) | gp3 (us-east-1) |
Storage | $0.125/GB-month | $0.08/GB-month |
IOPS (above baseline) | $0.065/IOPS-month | $0.005/IOPS-month (above 3,000) |
Example: a 500 GB io1 volume with 5,000 IOPS:
io1 cost: (500 × $0.125) + (5,000 × $0.065) = $62.50 + $325.00 = $387.50/month
gp3 cost: (500 × $0.08) + (2,000 × $0.005) = $40.00 + $10.00 = $50.00/month
Annual saving: ~$4,050/year (~87% reduction)
Operational Impact
Downtime: None — the volume type modification is performed in-place via the ModifyVolume API. The instance and volume remain fully operational throughout the conversion.
Breaking change: None — io1 and gp3 share the same EBS interface. No application code or configuration changes are required.
Data risk: None — the conversion is non-destructive. All data is preserved.
IOPS verification ⚠️: io1 volumes are often provisioned for I/O-intensive workloads. Before migrating, it is important to validate that the actual consumed IOPS (not just provisioned) are within gp3's supported range (max 80,000 IOPS). Over-provisioned io1 volumes are prime candidates; heavily utilized ones may not be suitable.
Multi-attach exclusion: io1 volumes with multi-attach enabled cannot be migrated to gp3 and are automatically excluded by the selection criteria.
Transition time: Conversion may take several minutes to hours depending on volume size. Performance remains available during the process.