Which is faster for read access on EC2; local drive or EBS?

Posted by Phillip Oldham on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Phillip Oldham
Published on 2010-02-10T16:45:23Z Indexed on 2010/04/14 11:03 UTC
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amazon-ec2

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amazon-ebs

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amazon-web-services

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zfs

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Performance

Which is faster for read access on an EC2 instance; the "local" drive or an attached EBS volume?

I have some data that needs to be persisted so have placed this on an EBS volume. I'm using OpenSolaris, so this volume has been attached as a ZFS pool. However, I have a large chunk of EC2 disk space that's going to go unused, so I'm considering re-purposing this as a ZFS cache volume but I don't want to do this if the disk access is going to be slower than that of the EBS volume as it would potentially have a detrimental effect.

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