[BioC] EBS volumes with the Bioconductor AMI: how to change default behaviour

[Quin Wills]

Hello Bioconductor AMI gurus

Delighted that Bioconductor has an AMI with pre-loaded bells and
whistles. I'm hardly an AWS guru (yet?), and in particular feel like
all the dots aren't connecting in my brain regarding EBS.

So I see that the Bioconductor AMI automatically initiates 1 x 20GiB
root EBS volume, and 3 x 30 GiB extra volumes, correct? What if I
don't want these? Presumably just detaching and deleting them in the
AWS management console is one way to do it? Is this the only
(reasonably easy) way?

For the moment I'm just using AWS for CPU-intensive work that I need
to speed up. I have an S3 bucket and am using the omegahat RAmazonS3
library to access and save data on a semi-permanent basis. Does this
seem like a reasonable tactic? For the moment, the sizes of the data
objects in my S3 bucket are manageable.

Perhaps there's a link to an idiots guide on "EBS vs S3" options and
suggestions when using the Bioconductor AMI?

Thanks in advance for any wisdom,
Quin