Comparison of Premium vs Standard for both Unmanaged & Managed Disks

Unmanaged disks are the traditional type of disks that have been used by VMs. With these disks, you create your own storage account and specify that storage account when you create the disk. Make sure you don't put too many disks in the same storage account, because you could exceed the scalability targets of the storage account (20,000 IOPS, for example), resulting in the VMs being throttled. If you are using premium storage accounts for unmanaged disks and your application exceeds the scalability targets of a single storage account, you might want to migrate to managed disks. If you don't want to migrate to managed disks, build your application to use multiple storage accounts. Then, partition your data across those storage accounts. For example, if you want to attach 51-TB disks across multiple VMs, spread them across two storage accounts. 35 TB is the limit for a single premium storage account. Make sure that a single premium storage account never has more than 35 TB of provisioned disks.

Managed Disks handles the storage account creation/management in the background for you, and ensures that you do not have to worry about the scalability limits of the storage account. Managed disks are stored in triplicate on Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS). The disks are designed to have 99.999% availability. Managed Disks will allow you to create up to 50,000 VM disks of a type in a subscription per region. For regional disaster recovery, you must back up your VM disks in a different region using Azure Backup service and a GRS storage account as backup vault.

The following table provides a comparison of Premium vs Standard for both unmanaged and managed disks:

Azure Premium Disk Azure Standard SSD Disk Azure Standard HDD Disk
Disk Type Solid State Drives (SSD) Solid State Drives (SSD) Hard Disk Drives (HDD)
Overview SSD-based high-performance, low-latency disk support for VMs running IO-intensive workloads or hosting mission critical production environment More consistent performance and reliability than HDD. Optimized for low-IOPS workloads. Recommended deployment option for most workloads. HDD-based cost effective disk for infrequent access. If you use unmanaged standard disks (HDD), you should enable TRIM (Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 and above). TRIM discards unused blocks on the disk so you are only billed for storage that you are actually using.
Scenario Production and performance sensitive workloads Web servers, lightly used enterprise applications and Dev/Test Backup, Non-critical, Infrequent access
Disk Size P4: 32 GiB (Managed Disks only)
P6: 64 GiB (Managed Disks only)
P10: 128 GiB
P15: 256 GiB (Managed Disks only)
P20: 512 GiB
P30: 1024 GiB
P40: 2048 GiB
P50: 4,095 GiB
P60: 8,192 GiB * (8 TiB)
P70: 16,384 GiB * (16 TiB)
P80: 32,767 GiB * (32 TiB)
Managed Disks only:
E10: 128 GiB
E15: 256 GiB
E20: 512 GiB
E30: 1024 GiB
E40: 2048 GiB
E50: 4095 GiB
E60: 8,192 GiB * (8 TiB)
E70: 16,384 GiB * (16 TiB)
E80: 32,767 GiB * (32 TiB)
Unmanaged Disks: 1 GiB – 4 TiB (4095 GiB)

Managed Disks:
S4: 32 GiB
S6: 64 GiB
S10: 128 GiB
S15: 256 GiB
S20: 512 GiB
S30: 1024 GiB
S40: 2048 GiB
S50: 4095 GiB
S60: 8,192 GiB * (8 TiB)
S70: 16,384 GiB * (16 TiB)
S80: 32,384 GiB * (32 TiB)
Max Throughput per Disk P4: 25 MiB/s
P6: 50 MiB/s
P10: 100 MiB/s
P15: 200 MiB/s
P20: 150 MiB/s
P30: 200 MiB/s
P40-P50: 250 MiB/s
P60: 480 MiB/s
P70-P80: 750 MiB/s
E10-E50: Up to 60 MiB/s
E60: Up to 300 MiB/s *
E70-E80: 500 MiB/s *
S4 - S50: Upt o 60 MiB/s
S60: Up to 300 MiB/s *
S70-S80: Up to 500 MiB/s *
Max IOPS per Disk P4: 120 IOPS
P6: 240 IOPS
P10: 500 IOPS
P15: 1100 IOPS
P20: 2300 IOPS
P30: 5000 IOPS
P40-P50: 7500 IOPS
P60: 12,500 IOPS *
P70: 15,000 IOPS *
P80: 20,000 IOPS *
E10-E50: Up to 500 IOPS
E60: Up to 1300 IOPS *
E70-E80: Up to 2000 IOPS *
S4-S50: Up to 500 IOPS
S60: Up to 1300 IOPS *
S70-S80: Up to 2000 IOPS *
Cost of transaction No transaction costs. Any type of operation against the storage is counted as a transaction, including reads, writes and deletes. $0.002 per 10,000 transaction units for Standard SSD Managed Disks. IO unit size of 256 KiB is used for counting the billable transaction units. $0.0005 per 10,000 transactions

A new fourth type of Managed Disk, Ultra SSD Managed Disks is currently in Preview

 Last updated on 4-Nov-2018.

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