Cloud king Amazon has added two disk-drive-based storage options to its EBS (Elastic Block Store).

There is a Throughput-Optimised HDD (st1) volume and a Cost HDD (sc1) volume.

The sc1 volume is for low access workloads, coldish data, with a price of $0.025/GB/month while the st1 volume is for frequent data access to Big Data, data warehouse and log processing data, and costs $0.045/GB/month. Both volumes are 500GB – 16TB in size.

Amazon said: "sc1 provides a burst model: these volumes can burst up to 80 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 12 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 250 MB/s per volume."

The st1 volumes "deliver performance in terms of throughput, measured in MB/s, and include the ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume."

Amazon EBS options

AWS VP for Compute Services, Peter DeSantis said: "These two new Amazon EBS volumes represent a step-level change in the cost and performance of HDDs, and make it more efficient to run throughput-intensive, big data workloads.”

AWS customers can launch EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes using the AWS Management Console, CLI SDKs. The st1 and sc1 volumes are available in all commercial AWS Regions. ®