Difficulty: Easy
Description
These volumes still use gp2, the previous generation of general-purpose storage. gp3 costs about 20% less per GB for the same or better performance, and the change is made in place with no downtime.
Selection Criteria
The EBS volume uses the gp2 storage type.
The EBS volume has been in active use (
in-use) for the last 7 days.
Expected Saving
~20% reduction on EBS storage cost for each migrated volume.
Volume type | Price (us-east-1) | Baseline IOPS |
gp2 | $0.10/GB-month | 3 IOPS/GB (burst to 3,000) |
gp3 | $0.08/GB-month | 3,000 IOPS flat |
Example: a 1 TB gp2 volume costs $100/month → $80/month on gp3 = $240/year saved per TB, with better baseline performance included at no extra cost.
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 — gp2 and gp3 share the same EBS API and interface. No application code or configuration changes are required.
Data risk: None — the conversion is non-destructive. All data is preserved.
Transition time: Conversion may take a few minutes to hours depending on volume size. IOPS and throughput remain available during the transition, though performance optimization completes after the modification is fully processed.