don't assume that if you hire a volume on AWS that you get a device. The thing you get is a virtual block device and is actually the entry point of a sophistica

don't assume that if you hire a volume on AWS that you get a device. The thing you get is a virtual block device and is actually the entry point of a sophisticated piece of software that will spread your data over multiple devices (might be erasure coded, might be replicated, probably hierarchical, so data comes in on NVMe, is then moved to SSD and eventually to HDD). So whatever you're seeing, it's not the behaviour of a single HDD.