Objective 3.1
SAA-C03Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions.
Objective 3.1 sits in Design High-Performing Architectures, which carries 24% of the Solutions Architect Associate exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Amazon Web Services (AWS) page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Amazon Web Services (AWS) exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
A reporting team scans terabytes of log files sequentially every night. Throughput is the binding constraint, not random IOPS. Which EBS volume type fits?
Correct.
Checked against docs.aws.amazon.com, August 2026Concept
EBS splits into two families. One is built for small random reads and writes where the count of operations decides the ceiling, the other for large sequential transfer where megabytes per second decides it. Pick the family the workload is actually limited by.
Why D
A nightly sequential scan is bound by megabytes per second, and the HDD family is priced and engineered for exactly that shape. st1 carries the big data, data warehouse and log processing cases, and it sustains 500 MiB/s per volume against sc1's 250.
Source
AWS docs: Amazon EBS volume types, checked August 2026HDD-backed volumes are optimized for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput. HDD volume types include Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD…
Now you: objective 3.1 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
You need 700 MiB/s of sustained throughput from the one 1 TiB gp2 volume an application uses. Which change delivers it?
Sample question 2 of 3
A team's application drives 12,000 GET requests per second against objects under a single S3 prefix and starts seeing 503 Slow Down errors. What raises the ceiling?
Sample question 3 of 3
A file system serves a workload that idles for hours and then spikes hard, and the team cannot forecast peak demand. Which EFS throughput mode fits?
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Read the sources
These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.