S3 Standard vs S3 Standard-IA vs S3 One Zone-IA vs S3 Intelligent Tiering vs S3 Express One Zone

Last updated on February 16, 2024

	S3 Standard	S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA)	S3 One Zone – Infrequent Access (IA)	S3 Intelligent Tiering	S3 Express One Zone
Features	General-purpose storage of frequently accessed data.	For long-lived, rapid but less frequently accessed data; data is stored redundantly in multiple AZs.	For long-lived, rapid but less frequently accessed data; data is stored redundantly in only one AZ of your choice.	For long-lived data that have unpredictable access patterns.	High performance storage for most frequently accessed data.
Durability	99.999999999% (11 9’s)	99.999999999% (11 9’s)	99.999999999% (11 9’s)	99.999999999% (11 9’s)	99.999999999% (11 9’s)
Availability	99.99%	99.9%	99.5%	99.9%	99.95%
Availability SLA	99.9%	99%	99%	99%	99.9%
Number of Availability Zones	At least 3	At least 3	Only 1	At least 3	Only 1
Minimum capacity charge per object	N/A	128KB	128KB	N/A	512KB
Minimum storage duration charge	N/A	30 days	30 Days	30 Days	1 hour
Inserting data	Directly PUT into S3 Standard.	Directly PUT into S3 Standard-IA or set Lifecycle policies to transition objects from the S3 Standard to the S3 Standard-IA storage class.	Directly PUT into S3 One Zone-IA or set Lifecycle policies to transition objects from the S3 Standard to the S3 One Zone-IA storage class.	Directly PUT into S3 Intelligent-Tiering or set Lifecycle policies to transition objects from the S3 Standard to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.	Directly PUT into S3 Express One Zone.
Retrieval fee	N/A	per GB retrieved	per GB retrieved	N/A	N/A
First byte latency	milliseconds	milliseconds	milliseconds	milliseconds	single-digit milliseconds
Storage transition	S3 Standard to all other S3 storage types, including Glacier	S3 Standard-IA to S3 One Zone-IA or S3 Glacier	S3 One Zone-IA to S3 Glacier	S3 Intelligent to S3 One Zone-IA or S3 Glacier	You can either upload new objects directly or copy data from other storage classes.
Use cases	Cloud applications, dynamic websites, content distribution, mobile and gaming applications, and big data analytics.	Ideally suited for long-term file storage, older sync and share storage, and other aging data.	For infrequently-accessed storage, like backup copies, disaster recovery copies, or other easily recreatable data.	Data with unknown or changing access patterns, optimize storage costs automatically, and unpredictable workloads.	For most frequently accessed data.

Additional Notes:

Data stored in the S3 One Zone-IA storage class will be lost in the event of AZ destruction.
S3 Standard-IA costs less than S3 Standard in terms of storage price, while still providing the same high durability, throughput, and low latency of S3 Standard.

S3 One Zone-IA has 20% less cost than Standard-IA.
It is recommended to use multipart upload for objects larger than 100MB.

Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.