For a typical IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud usage, to strengthen a system, temporary and frequent provisioning of virtual volumes is needed. However, the performance of HDD (hard disk drive) storage is not sufficient and has become a bottleneck in IaaS cloud now. In this letter, we make a comparative study of HDD–SSD (solid‐state drive) hybrid storage, distributed storage, and normal HDD storage as the block storage of OpenStack Cinder, and evaluate the applicability of these three types storage to the IaaS cloud. Hybrid storage can achieve much higher performance compared to HDD storage and is suitable for analysis applications, but distributed storage performance degradation is lower than HDD storage when the number of concurrent processing is increased and is suitable for archiving or storing a large number of files. © 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.