Difficulty: Medium
Description
These io2 volumes fit within gp3 limits (80,000 IOPS, 2,000 MiB/s). Unless you need io2's higher durability, gp3 gives similar performance for much less.
Selection Criteria
The EBS volume uses the io2 storage type.
The volume size is 64 TiB or less (gp3 maximum size).
The provisioned IOPS is 80,000 or less (gp3 maximum IOPS).
The provisioned throughput is 2,000 MiB/s or less (gp3 maximum throughput).
The volume has a storage cost in the CUR over the last 7 days.
Expected Saving
Up to ~87% of the volume's storage and IOPS cost, depending on its size and provisioned IOPS.
We take the volume's io2 storage and IOPS cost from the CUR over the last 7 days and annualize it. The gp3 cost is estimated from that same storage cost: gp3 storage is about 36% cheaper per GB than io2, and only the IOPS above the 3,000 included with gp3 are charged.
Cost component | io2 (us-east-1) | gp3 (us-east-1) |
Storage | $0.125/GB-month | $0.08/GB-month |
IOPS | $0.065/IOPS-month (up to 32,000) | $0.005/IOPS-month (above 3,000) |
Example: a 500 GB io2 volume with 5,000 IOPS:
io2 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
✅ No downtime — the volume type is changed in place with Elastic Volumes (
ModifyVolume); the instance and volume stay available during the conversion, and no data is lost.⚠️ Lower durability — gp3 offers 99.8–99.9% durability versus 99.999% for io2. Keep io2 for workloads that depend on that durability guarantee.
⚠️ Latency-sensitive workloads — io2 Block Express provides sub-millisecond, consistent latency. Validate the actual IOPS and latency needs of the workload (not only the provisioned values) before migrating.
⚠️ Multi-Attach — gp3 does not support Multi-Attach. An io2 volume attached to several instances cannot be migrated.
⏳ Modification cooldown — after a modification, AWS requires about 6 hours before the same volume can be modified again, and the optimization can take from minutes to hours depending on volume size.