Updated 25 October 2026 · Published by Zoorik
Disk throughput is the amount of data a disk reads and writes each second. AWS gives it in mebibytes per second (MiB/s), and Azure in megabytes per second (MB/s). It’s also called storage throughput or disk input/output (I/O) throughput.
Throughput is the size of each operation times input/output operations per second (IOPS). Your virtual machine (VM) has its own limit too, and the smaller one wins.
An example from AWS
AWS’s example uses a gp2 volume with burst credits, limited to 3,000 IOPS and 250 MiB/s:
- With 256 KiB operations, it hits 250 MiB/s at 1,000 IOPS.
- With 16 KiB ones, it runs all 3,000 IOPS at about 47 MiB/s.
Why it matters for your bill
On some disks, throughput grows with size:
- A gp2 volume of up to 170 GiB gets 128 MiB/s at most. It needs 334 GiB for a steady 250 MiB/s.
- A 128 GiB Premium SSD (P10) has a base of 100 MB/s, and a 1,024 GiB P30 has 200 MB/s.
So you may pay for space you don’t need, just for speed. Check both limits before you buy a bigger disk.
A gp3 volume includes 125 MiB/s of EBS volume throughput, and Premium SSD v2 includes 125 MB/s. More costs extra on both.
Amoeba moves a VM’s data disks onto one pool sized to your data, then rightsizes it autonomously. Each gp3 volume in the pool gets at least 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s, and more when the VM’s measured load needs it.
The free assessment works out your own figure.
Read next: Azure disk IOPS vs throughput: what limits your disks
Sources: AWS, “Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD volumes” (opens in a new tab); AWS, “Amazon EBS I/O characteristics and monitoring” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Select a disk type for Azure IaaS VMs” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Azure premium storage: Design for high performance” (opens in a new tab).