Pre-Warming of EBS Volumes is not necessary

A number of people have asked me about pre-warming of new EBS volumes. I do realise that there are a lot of courses and exam dumps out there stating this is necessary. In fact it is not necessary with new volumes and if you answer this incorrectly you will lose valuable marks on the exam.

The only situation where preparation is required before access is with volumes that were restored from a snapshot:

"New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). However, storage blocks on volumes that were restored from snapshots must be initialized (pulled down from Amazon S3 and written to the volume) before you can access the block." Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes

When in doubt read the docs

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New 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS EBS Volumes

AWS have now made available Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes with up to 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS and a maximum throughput of 320 MBps.

Before you would need to attach 16 x 1 TB 1250 IOPS volumes to achieve the same performance.

General Purpose (SSD) volumes are also now available with up to 16 TB and 10,000 IOPS and a maximum throughput of 160 MBps.

General Purpose (SSD) volumes are also now designed to deliver a consistent baseline performance of 3 IOPS/GB to a maximum of 10,000 IOPS, and provide up to 160 MBps of throughput per volume.

More information in the docs:
Amazon EBS Product Details
EC2 User Guide