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What's the Difference Between Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx?

Compare Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon EFS
Amazon FSx
Category

Storage, File Storage

Storage, File Storage

Description

Serverless, fully elastic file storage

Fully managed file storage built on popular file systems — Windows File Server, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS.

Best for
  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage
  • Windows file shares
  • HPC workloads
  • Machine learning
  • EDA
  • Media processing
Key features
  • Elastic scaling
  • Multi-AZ
  • Lifecycle management
  • NFS compatible
  • Throughput modes
  • Multiple file system types
  • Active Directory integration
  • High throughput
  • Data deduplication
  • Multi-AZ
Pricing model

Pay per GB stored; no provisioning required

Pay per GB provisioned + throughput

Free tier

Yes

No

Expert take

“EFS is the answer when multiple EC2 instances or containers need concurrent read/write access to the same file system. It grows and shrinks automatically, so you never have to provision capacity or worry about running out of space.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“FSx for Lustre delivers hundreds of GB/s throughput for HPC and ML training workloads. FSx for Windows is the right choice when workloads need SMB protocol and Active Directory integration. Pick the file system type that matches your protocol and performance needs.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon EFS or Amazon FSx

Use Amazon EFS when:

  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage

Learn more about Amazon EFS »

Use Amazon FSx when:

  • Windows file shares
  • HPC workloads
  • Machine learning
  • EDA
  • Media processing

Learn more about Amazon FSx »

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