Only if your (storage) network is slow (eg 1/10/25 GbE).
With a decent network (eg modern infiniband, 40+GbE, etc) for the storage, the latency and throughput to the storage shouldn't make a difference.
For example (years ago), I used to set up SSD arrays - SATA at the time, as M.2 wasn't a thing - and have them served over a 20Gbs Infiniband network to hosts in the same data centre.
The access times from an OS perspective to hit that storage over the network were the same as for hitting local disk. But the networked storage was higher bandwidth (multiple SSD's, instead of a single per host).
Worked really well. :)
Looks like it's still an active project too, as there's a new release listed from November 2018.
EBS is a compromise, its allows your data to run anywhere in a region, on any machine. That means lots of hops and lots of interconnects.
the latest SAS stuff runs at 12 gigs(most likely 4 lanes per cable, and dual linked too.), _but_ thats dedicated for local traffic. The performance difference between having a SAS disk inside a box, or in the next rack is negligible. A decent SAN that exports over a 56gig connect (inifiniband et al) will be >> than a local pcie in terms of iops and sustained bandwith (at the expense of latency.)
Crucially, in somewhere that runs it's own datacenter, the storage is modelled for a specific workload. In VFX land we had 32 60 disk file servers, each capable of saturating two 10 gig ethernet links. But it'd be appalling for mixed VM hosting.
EBS is a hedged bet, it had a _boatload_ of caching to make any sort of performance. It had a huge amount of QoS to stop selfish loads stealing all the IOPs.
To get the best performance from EBS you have to have large volumes (5Tb+) and large latest generation instances (c5, r5, m5) 4 or 8/9 xlarge ec2 instances. This costs money to run.
that should read AZ
of course there are a lot of systems where one MySQL DB instance is needed and sufficient for the forseeable future. so that's a very static resource allocation one VM on a hypervisor with local disk, (and with backups every day), makes a lot of smaller sites very happy, and if they get the local provisioned performance instead of the EBS variant they will be happier for longer.
of course, EBS is a lot more fault tolerant.
EBS is not your typical SAN, which usually offer much more throughput, IOPS, and reliability in exchange for more complexity and latency, however you probably won't even notice that latency if your SAN system is close enough and using highend links.
Furthermore, you'll never get close to saturating a 40gbps link with a database workload, your limitation is iops, not throughput, and you don't have anywhere near enough cpu to max out those links in a loaded server much less a nuc.