Fastest / best way copy data between S3 to EC2?

Question

I have a fairly large amount of data (~30G, split into ~100 files) I'd like to transfer between S3 and EC2: when I fire up the EC2 instances I'd like to copy the data from S3 to EC2 local disks as quickly as I can, and when I'm done processing I'd like to copy the results back to S3.

I'm looking for a tool that'll do a fast / parallel copy of the data back and forth. I have several scripts hacked up, including one that does a decent job, so I'm not looking for pointers to basic libraries; I'm looking for something fast and reliable.

Answer 1

I think you might be after an Elastic Block Store, which (by my understanding) is like a 'drive' on S3 that can be mounted into your EC2 instance without having to copy the data each time.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/