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This guide walks you through upgrading Amazon EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3. The upgrade is done in-place with no downtime required.
gp3 volumes are up to 20% cheaper than gp2 and offer better baseline performance (3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput included).

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Before you start

Make sure:
  • You can log in to the AWS Console and have IAM permissions for EC2.
  • You have the AWS CLI installed and configured (for CLI method).
  • The volume is in the available or in-use state.
  • You haven’t modified the volume in the last 6 hours (AWS allows one modification per volume every 6 hours).

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Option 1 · AWS Console

  1. Open the EC2 console.
  2. Go to Elastic Block Store → Volumes.
  3. Select the gp2 volume you want to upgrade.
  4. Click Actions → Modify volume.
  5. Change Volume type from gp2 to gp3.
  6. (Optional) Adjust IOPS and Throughput if needed:
    • Default: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s (included in the base price).
    • Increase only if your workload requires more.
  7. Click Modify and confirm.
The modification runs in the background. Monitor the State column until it shows completed.

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Option 2 · AWS CLI

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Upgrade a single volume

aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-type gp3 --volume-id vol-0123456789abcdef0

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Upgrade all gp2 volumes at once

aws ec2 describe-volumes \
  --filters Name=volume-type,Values=gp2 \
  --query 'Volumes[*].VolumeId' \
  --output text | xargs -n 1 aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-type gp3 --volume-id

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Check modification status

aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications --volume-id vol-0123456789abcdef0

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Extra resources