Magnetic EBS volumes are no longer a thing

[nathan-cho]

Got this question in one of the practice exams and thought I should highlight that this question is old and should be revised or thrown out. Magnetic EBS volumes are no longer a thing.

You are the technical lead of the Cloud Infrastructure team in your company and you were consulted by a software developer regarding the required AWS resources of the web application that he is building. He knows that an Instance Store only provides ephemeral storage where the data is automatically deleted when the instance is terminated. To ensure that the data of his web application persists, the app should be launched in an EC2 instance that has a durable, block-level storage volume attached. He knows that they need to use an EBS volume, but they are not sure what type they need to use.

In this scenario, which of the following is true about Amazon EBS volume types and their respective usage? (Select TWO.)

Provisioned IOPS volumes offer storage with consistent and low-latency performance, and are designed for I/O intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases.

Magnetic volumes provide the lowest cost per gigabyte of all EBS volume types and are ideal for workloads where data is accessed infrequently, and applications where the lowest storage cost is important.

[TutorialsDojo-Support]

Hi nathan-cho,

Thanks for the feedback.

The question for the practice tests is created based on the topics on the exam guide from AWS.

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-assoc/AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-Associate_Exam-Guide.pdf

These topics include EBS and the different EBS volume types which include the SSD and HDD (magnetic storage types). The goal of this particular question is not to encourage you to use Magnetic EBS volumes on your EC2 instances but rather to evaluate your understanding of the different EBS volume types and their particular use cases. For AWS Exam takers it is important to know the concepts and choose the correct EBS volume type depending on the given situation.

That’s why the question asks which of the following statements are true about EBS volumes.

For more information for EBS types and their use cases see this link:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-volume-types.html

Thanks and regards,

Kenneth Samonte @ Tutorials Dojo

[nathan-cho]

Right, but looking at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-volume-types.html

it says that magnetic is a previous generation volume type. They don’t even offer it anymore!

The exam answer options didn’t have any of the HDD options like throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Cold HDD (sc1)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  nathan-cho. Reason: clarification

[TutorialsDojo-Support]

Hi nathan-cho,

AWS still offers magnetic storage types with st1 and sc1. You can also create them manually on the EC2 console and they have their own use cases.

Example workloads with high throughput on a consistent basis, for use with EC2 instances and Amazon EMR clusters while providing very low costs.

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) – Designed for high-throughput MapReduce, Kafka, ETL, log processing, and data warehouse workloads

Cold HDD (sc1) – Designed for workloads similar to those for Throughput Optimized HDD that are accessed less frequently

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-cold-storage-and-throughput-options/

https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/volume-types/

Regards,

Kenneth Samonte @ Tutorials Dojo

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  TutorialsDojo-Support.