Larger, more powerful standard file shares are now generally available. For more information please refer to the blog “Announcing the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files.” 

Azure Files has always delivered secure, fully managed cloud file shares with a full range of data redundancy options. While customers love the simplicity of Azure Files and the hybrid capabilities of Azure File Sync, until now, scaling cloud file shares beyond 5 TiB required changing the paradigm for accessing data.

Today, we are excited to announce the preview of a larger and higher scale standard tier for Azure Files, now available to all Azure customers. This preview significantly improves your experience by increasing standard file shares’ capacity and performance limits. In select regions, standard file shares in general purpose accounts can support the following larger limits.

Azure Files standard storage scale limits

Azure Files	Before (standard tier)	New (standard tier)
Capacity per share	5 TiB	100 TiB (20x increase)
Max IOPS per share	1,000 IOPS	10,000 IOPS (10x increase)
Max throughput per share	Up to 60 MiB/s	Up to 300 MiB/s (5x increase)

Performance limits for a single file remain the same at 1 TiB, 1000 IOPS, and 60 MiB/s. Standard file shares are backed by hard disk drives. If your workload is latency sensitive, you should consider Azure Files premium tier, that is backed by solid-state drives. Visit Azure Files scale limits documentation to get more details.

Pricing and availability

There is no additional charge for enabling larger and increased scale for standard file shares on your storage accounts. Refer to the pricing page for further details.

We are introducing standard larger file shares in preview with support for locally redundant and zone redundant storages in select regions. We are quickly expanding the region coverage. We advise you to visit region availability documentation to get the latest information.

Getting started

1. Sign up for the preview of larger file shares (standard tier): Follow the onboarding steps in the Azure Files documentation.
2. Create a new storage account: In your registered subscription, create a new general purpose storage account in one of the supported regions with a supported redundancy option. See detailed steps on how to create a new storage account.
3. Create a new standard file share: Create a new standard file share under the newly created storage account. See detailed steps on how to create a standard file share.

Frequently asked questions

Do larger file shares work with premium file shares?

We recently announced general availability (GA) of premium files with 100 TiB support. All premium regions support large file shares as a GA offering.

Does Azure File Sync support larger file shares?

Absolutely. Azure File Sync performance is a function of the number of objects, files and folders, in the sync scope, rather than of the capacity of the file share in the cloud. Our team is constantly making investments in improving the performance and scale of sync and cloud tiering. So, keep your Azure File Sync agent updated with the latest version and visit Azure File Sync scalability targets to keep informed of the latest scale.

What about larger file shares support for my existing standard shares?

We are working on upgrading existing storage accounts. After the existing accounts are upgraded, you will be able to opt-in your accounts into the larger file shares feature without any disruption to your existing workloads, including Azure File Sync. Stay up to date on the latest status through the region availability section of Azure Files documentation.

Share your experiences

As always, you can share your feedback and experiences on the Azure Storage forum or just send us email at LFSFeedback@microsoft.com. Post your ideas and suggestions about Azure Storage on our feedback forum.

Happy sharing!