Azure Ultra SSD, champion of the Managed Disk

While the announcement of Ultra SSDs isn’t necessarily brand new, I wanted to take a moment to write about it. In all its high capacity, high throughput glory.

Window Shopping

I currently don’t have a reason to use Ultra SSDs, however the thought of using an Azure VM (a supported size) with a disk that can offer up to 2,000 MiB/s and 160K IOPS, I was astounded.

Microsoft has posted that the max throughput is available on disks 32GiB and higher. To achieve the IOPS limit, that requires 1TiB or up to 64TiB Maximum. More Information on Binary prefixes (TiB).

The minimum offering for Ultra SSD comes in a 4GB option at 1,200 IOPS and 300MB/s Max Throughput.

Weighing The Options

UltraSSDs are ~2.2x faster than Premium SSD, ~2.6x than Standard SSD and ~4x faster than Standard HDD.

Similar to other managed disks, we have the option for a custom size. However as you can see, you’ll be charged for the provisioned capacity regardless of how much is used.

Unlike other disks, you can define your performance requirements for an ultra disk, each coming with their own cost.

ULTRA DISK CONFIGURATION	UNIT	PRICE
Disk Capacity (GiB)	GiB/hour	$0.000164
Provisioned IOPS	IOPS/hour	$0.000068
Provisioned Throughput (MB/s)	MB/s/hour	$0.00137
Provisioned vcpu reservation charge*	vcpu/hour	$0.006