• Hardware storage directly attached to EC2 instance (cannot be detached and attached to another instance)
• Highest IOPS of any available storage (millions of IOPS)
• Ephemeral storage (loses data when the instance is stopped, hibernated or terminated)
• Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
• AMI created from an instance does not have its instance store volume preserved

<aside> 💡 You can specify the instance store volumes only when you launch an instance. You can’t attach instance store volumes to an instance after you’ve launched it.

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RAID

• RAID 0
  • Improve performance of a storage volume by distributing reads & writes in a stripe across attached volumes
  • If you add a storage volume, you get the straight addition of throughput and IOPS
  • For high performance applications
• RAID 1
  • Improve data availability by mirroring data in multiple volumes
  • For critical applications