Storage optimized EC2 instances
AWS groups 90 current EC2 instance types into the storage optimized family, across 13 series. The median Linux on-demand price in US East is $0.0944 per vCPU-hour, and 40% of these types run on Arm-based Graviton processors.
By median price per vCPU, the cheapest series is h1 (Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell), $0.0585 per vCPU-hour) and the dearest is is4gen (AWS Graviton2 Processor, $0.1441). Unit price is not everything: newer processors do more work per vCPU, and some series add local NVMe storage or faster networking. The table lists every current series with its size count, unit price and memory per vCPU, so you can shortlist by shape first and price second.
Arm-based Graviton types have a median of $0.0909 per vCPU-hour against $0.0944 for x86, so Graviton is 3.6% cheaper per vCPU if your software runs on arm64. Prices span from the is4gen.medium (1 vCPU, 6 GiB) at $0.1441/hour, about $105 a month, to the i7ie.48xlarge (192 vCPUs, 1536 GiB) at $24.95/hour, about $18,214 a month.
| Series | Processor | Sizes | $/vCPU-h | GiB/vCPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| h1 | Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) | 4 | $0.0585 | 4.0 |
| i4g | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 6 | $0.0772 | 8.0 |
| i3 | Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) | 6 | $0.0780 | 7.6 |
| i4i | Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) | 9 | $0.0858 | 8.0 |
| i8g | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 9 | $0.0858 | 8.0 |
| im4gn | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 6 | $0.0910 | 4.0 |
| i7i | Intel Xeon Scalable (Emerald Rapids) | 9 | $0.0944 | 8.0 |
| i3en | Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 | 7 | $0.1130 | 8.0 |
| i8ge | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 9 | $0.1187 | 8.0 |
| d3 | Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) | 4 | $0.1249 | 8.0 |
| i7ie | Intel Xeon Scalable (Emerald Rapids) | 9 | $0.1300 | 8.0 |
| d3en | Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) | 6 | $0.1314 | 4.0 |
| is4gen | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 6 | $0.1441 | 6.0 |