Comment by bmurphy

My experience has been that EBS handles concurrent loads better, ephemeral drives handle non-concurrent loads better.

Transferring 100gb+ of data on EBS (even with an 8x RAID) is a nightmare. Ephemeral drives, however, it's fairly fast.

Throw 100+ database connections at a few ephemeral drives (even in a RAID) and watch your web site slow to a crawl.