Azure increases the maximum size and performance of Azure Disks

We are excited to announce an increase of maximum disk sizes for both Premium and Standard storage. This extends the maximum size of the disks from 1,024 GB to 4,095 GB and enables customers to add 4x more disk storage capacity per VM. Customers can now provision up to a total of 256 TB disks storage on a GS5 VM using 64 disks with 4 TB capacity. As a result, customers no longer need to scale up to multiple VMs or stripe multiple disks to provision larger disk capacity.

Large Disks are currently available in all Azure regions including sovereign clouds, which consist of US Gov (unmananged Disks only), US DOD, Germany, and China.

To provide flexibility for customers to provision an appropriate disk size which matches their workloads, we introduce two new disk sizes in P40 (2TB) and P50 (4TB) for both Managed and unmanaged Premium Disks; S40 (2TB) and S50 (4TB) for Standard Managed Disks. Customers can also provision the maximum disk size of 4,095 GB for Standard unmanaged disks.

Larger Premium Disks P40 and P50 will support your IO intensive workload, consequently, offers higher provisioned disk performance. The maximum Premium Disk IOPS and bandwidth is increased to 7,500 IOPS and 250 MBps respectively. Standard Disks, of all sizes, will offer up to 500 IOPS and 60 MBps.

You can create a larger disk or resize existing disks to larger disk sizes with your existing Azure tools through Azure Resource Manager (ARM). We have also lit up Azure Portal support for larger disks in global regions. Portal support for sovereign clouds will be enabled by the end of July 2017. To upload VHD file of more than 1TB as page blob or unmanaged disks, use the latest released toolsets. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery support for larger disks is coming soon.

Smaller Premium Managed Disks (32 GB and 64 GB) for cost efficiency

We will also offer two smaller disk sizes P4 (32GB) and P6 (64 GB) for Premium Managed Disks. You can use these new smaller sizes to optimize cost in scenarios in which you require consistent disk performance but with lower disk capacity, such as the OS disks for Linux VMs. We already offer smaller disk sizes for Standard Managed Disks.

New Premium Managed Disks created after June 15th, 2017 with disk size between 33GB and 64GB will be provisioned as P6 Premium Disks, and as P4 Premium Disks if the size is less than or equal to 32GB. The change of disk creation behavior has been gradually taking effect in all Azure regions in the week from June 15th to 23rd, and is now globally available. Your existing Premium Managed Disks with disk size smaller and equal to 64GB deployed before June 15th, 2017 will stay at P10 disk performance and pricing tier. You can also resize your disks to more than 64GB to maintain your disk performance at P10 level.

Currently, the new P4 and P6 Premium Disk sizes are only available for Managed Disks. We will soon release the support of these smaller sizes for unmanaged Premium Disks. If you are not yet ready to migrate to Managed Disks, please stay tuned.

Pricing

You can visit the Managed Disk Pricing and unmanaged Disk Pricing pages for more details about large disks and smaller Premium Managed Disks pricing.

Getting started

• Create new Managed Disks
• Expand OS Disk
• Expand Data Disk