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Arkaaito
Asked: 2014-11-05 16:50:09 +0800 CST

How can I find out the storage type of an EC2 instance's root volume (SSD vs. magnetic)?

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I have a number of AWS EC2 instances which are serving as the backend of a production app. Many of them predate the availability of general SSD storage; however, some of the more recent ones do use SSD for their root volume.

I'd like to convert all the ones that still use magnetic storage to take advantage of SSD storage as well, but I'd prefer not to destroy and recreate any instances which are already on SSDs. How can I determine the type of the storage associated with a particular instance's root volume?

amazon-ec2

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you select your instance in the web console you can see the volume ID of the instance (it begins with "vol-"), clicking on that will bring you to the volume in the "Volumes" section of the EC2 console. In the storage type column it will tell you whether the volume is "magnetic" (old volumes), GP2 (new ssd) or PIOPS.

    Edit: Additionally, you should be able to tell if you run (using the AWS CLI)

    aws ec2 describe-instances
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  2. davidgo is right. You can measure the speed. This hint is from https://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-check-if-your-ec2-instance-uses-ssd/

    Example:

    sudo ioping -R /dev/xvda1 -c 1000

    Replace xvda1 with your device/filesystem. ioping stats for SSD should show way much faster rates.

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