Microsoft Cloud Hard Drive Selection Guide: Advanced SSD, Standard SSD, and Ultra Disk Performance Deep Teardown

cloud 2026-06-05 阅读 9

After deploying virtual machines in Azure, many people will face the next extremely core and easy choice:

What hard disk (managed disk) is assigned to the virtual machine?

There are often R & D or O & M students who come to complain: "I obviously chose a virtual machine with extremely powerful CPU, why is the database still as slow as an old cow pulling a cart?" Or "Why is the disk throughput inexplicably locked when my system just reached the peak business period?"

The reason is often not that the CPU is not enough, but that you have chosen the wrong storage disk. Azure's cloud disk does not just pick a capacity, different disk types determine your business

Upper Performance Limit

with

Downward speed of the wallet

Today's in-depth tutorial uses the most grounded real-life writing style to take you to a thorough understanding.

Standard SSD(Standard SSD), Premium SSD(Premium SSD/SSD v2), and Ultra Disk

The essential difference between the actual combat selection logic, let you spend the least money, hit the most powerful I/O performance.

1. core performance indicators: not only to see "capacity", but also to see "double throughput"

Before picking a disk, you must carve out two hard core indicators to measure the speed of the hard disk:

IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second): A measure of how many times a hard disk can be read and written per second. Random small file reads and writes (such as highly concurrent OLTP databases and Redis cache) require extremely high IOPS.

Throughput / Bandwidth (Throughput / Bandwidth): A measure of how many megabytes of data can be transferred per second. Continuous reading and writing of large files (such as video rendering, big data analysis, and data warehouse backup) requires extremely high throughput.

⚠️Pit avoidance iron law: The performance of cloud disks usually increases with the growth of capacity. You buy a 128 GB disk and a 1 TB disk, even if the type is the same, the speed is very different.

2. three big cloud players dismantling: who is your day dish?

We pulled out Azure's mainstream SSDs and analyzed them one by one from low to high.

1. Standard SSD (Standard SSD) -the "king of cost performance" with limited budget"

Standard SSDs are aimed at services that are lightweight and insensitive to performance fluctuations.

Performance characteristics: It has relatively low IOPS and throughput. The maximum IOPS of a single disk is usually several thousand. Because it is a shared architecture, there are occasional minor performance jitters in the cloud.

Application scenario: The system disk of the Web server (the operating system starts fast enough). Development, testing, temporary staging environment. Lightweight internal enterprise applications with very low traffic.

One comment: As long as you don't run the core database, choosing it can save you a lot of budget.

2. Advanced SSD (Premium SSD & Prem

Ium SSD v2) -Absolute Enterprise Main Force

This is the most recommended and most used star product in the Azure ecosystem, and is almost the default first choice for production environments.

The premium SSD is now in two versions:

Premium SSD (v1): Strong binding between performance and capacity. For example, if you want to 5000 IOPS, you must buy a disk with more than 1 TB, even if you only need 100 GB of data. It supports "disk burst (Bursting)", which can break the performance limit in a short time when encountering burst traffic.

Premium SSD v2 (a new generation of rookies): completely break the binding of God! You can buy an extremely cheap 100 GB hard drive and give it an ultra-high speed of 10,000 IOPS separately.

Application scenario: mainstream databases in the production environment (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle). High-load e-commerce and ERP systems. Large volume of container persistence (AKS).

In a word, if it is a production environment, no brain can choose Premium SSD v2, which can achieve the perfect combination of high speed and small capacity.

3. Ultra High Disk (Ultra Disk) -Destroying "Performance Monster"

If advanced SSD is high-speed rail, then Ultra USB (Ultra Disk) is a rocket. It is the lowest-latency, highest-capped, top-tier storage in Azure.

Performance characteristics: Its latency can reach sub-millisecond (less than 1 millisecond). The IOPS of a single disk can be piled up to an astonishing 160,000, and the throughput can reach 4000 MB/s.

Dynamic overclocking: The most frightening thing is that the ultra-high USB flash drive supports online thermal modification performance. In other words, there is a big promotion at 3: 00 this afternoon. You don't have to stop the machine. You can directly drag the IOPS from 2000 to 50,000 in the console. After the promotion, you can drag it back again. The cost is calculated accurately by the hour.

Scenario: Core financial trading systems that are extremely sensitive to delays. Extremely large SAP Hana, high-load Oracle database base. An extreme scenario where even the slightest bit of delay jitter can lead to a business crash.

One sentence comment: expensive is not its shortcoming, it is my shortcoming. Only the real geek business and the giants that are not short of money need it.

3. a table to see the gap (visual comparison)

Indicator/Disk Type

Standard SSD (Standard SSD)

Advanced SSD v1 (Premium)

Advanced SSD v2 (New!)

Ultra Disk

Maximum capacity per disk

32 TB

64 TB

Maximum IOPS per disk

6,000

20,0

80,000

160,000

Maximum throughput per disk

750 MB/s

900 MB/s

1,200 MB/s

4,000 MB/s

Typical Access Latency

A few milliseconds to ten milliseconds

Single-digit milliseconds (5-10ms)

Less than 5 ms

Less than 1 millisecond (sub-millisecond)

Performance and capacity binding

Yes

No (fully decoupled)

Online tuning performance

Not supported

Support

Perfect support (effective immediately)

4. actual combat selection: three steps to determine your plan

In practice, how can you do it without making hardware a bottleneck and without wasting overhead? Follow these three steps:

Step 1: Check the "ceiling" of the virtual machine (virtual machine cached/not cached limit)

This is a mistake that 90% of people will make!

The speed of the cloud disk is limited by the hardware limit of the virtual machine itself.

Let's say you buy a premium SSD v2 that can run 80,000 IOPS, but you mount it on an entry-level B- series (such as Standard_B2s) virtual machine. The maximum disk IOPS of this virtual machine in the official document is only 1,280.

Result: Your hard disk is desperately trying to run, but the CPU and motherboard bandwidth are stuck in it. You can only get 1,280 IOPS in the end, wasting the high money of advanced SSD v2.

Rule: The upper performance limit of the hard disk must match the disk specification of the virtual machine. For high I/O, virtual machines should look for high-performance series with Ds_v5 or Es_v5 ending with "s.

Step 2: Evaluate whether the business is "read more" or "write more"

If your virtual machine supports Host Caching ":

Read-Only or Read-Write cache: For advanced SSDs. Azure will open up a place for caching in the host memory of the virtual machine. If you are a database that reads more and writes less, turning on the Read-Only cache allows some high-frequency queries to go directly to memory, doubling IOPS instantly without extra money!

Note: Ultra-high disk (Ultra Disk) does not support or require host cache because it directly pursues the extreme speed of the physical bottom layer.

The third step: landing the final choice

Scenario A: I want to set up a test environment, or an internal OA system that usually punches in a few people.👉Select Standard SSD. Cheap, completely enough.

Scenario B: I want to run the core MySQL / SQL Server database in the production environment, with a storage capacity of about 200GB, but the business concurrency is quite high.👉It is highly recommended to choose advanced SSD v2. Buy 200 GB capacity and increase IOPS to 5 separately

000-8000. Cost performance and performance directly pull full.

Scenario C: The company's most core billing system, core high-frequency transaction matching engine, data must not wait, a delay of one or two milliseconds will lead to queuing.👉Close your eyes and choose Ultra Disk. And configure online elastic scripts, during the daytime peak full performance, late night trough to reduce IOPS, to achieve fine money.

Summary

Azure's disk selection is essentially a

A balanced game about capacity, speed and cost

In the past, we had to be forced to buy huge redundancies in pursuit of speed; and

Premium SSD v2

We have truly ushered in the era of "independent payment by performance.

Keep in mind the "ceiling limit" of virtual machines and accurately match the standard SSD, advanced SSD v2 and ultra-high USB disk according to the service frequency, so that you can spend every budget on the cutting edge while ensuring the stability of the system.