I tried doing the same thing on a Macbook Pro i7/SSD and it took ~1 hour.
EBS disk performance is reliable, but miserable.
EBS performance is unreliable and miserable. There, fixed that for you.
However, EBS also has a couple things going for it. Namely: easy snapshots, fast/seamless provisioning (need another 1T?), mobility (need that volume on another instance?) and quite a fair price point when you take all that into account.
All of which are doable with LVM.
EBS is just a mouse-click.
It's far from "rack and forget" once you've grow beyond 2 racks.
I have dealt with storage 'at scale' enough to require a full team of storage people.
Some guy clicking buttons on the Amazon website is usually not a very effective way of dealing with storage 'at scale'.
However I maintain that EBS has it's place in a wide range of applications where raw I/O performance isn't the main concern (e.g. archival).
There I said it!