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 except sovereign clouds, which includes US Gov, US DOD, Germany, and China. We will have large disks available in sovereign clouds in a few weeks.
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.
| Premium Disks | Standard Disks | |
| Managed Disks | P40, P50 | S40, S50 |
| Unmanaged Disks | P40, P50 | Max up to 4,095GB |
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.
| P40 | P50 | S40 | S50 | |
| Disk Size | 2048 GB | 4095 GB | 2048 GB | 4095 GB |
| Disk IOPS | 7,500 IOPS | 7,500 IOPS | Up to 500 IOPS | Up to 500 IOPS |
| Disk Bandwidth | 250 MBps | 250 MBps | Up to 60 MBps | Up to 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 will light up Azure Portal support for larger disks next week. 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.
| P4 | P6 | |
| Disk Size | 32 GB | 64 GB |
| Disk IOPS | 120 IOPS | 240 IOPS |
| Disk Bandwidth | 25 MBps | 50 MBps |
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 will gradually take effect in all Azure regions in the coming week. 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.