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Azure Managed Disks are block-level storage volumes managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. They abstract away the complexity of managing storage accounts for VM disks, providing high availability, durability, and scalable performance. This lesson covers disk types, sizing, performance tiers, encryption, and best practices.
Managed Disks are Azure's recommended disk storage solution for VMs. Unlike unmanaged disks (which require you to create and manage storage accounts and page blobs yourself), managed disks handle all the underlying storage account management automatically.
Every VM can have three types of disk attached:
| Disk Role | Description | Required? | Data Persistence |
|---|---|---|---|
| OS Disk | Contains the operating system. Registered as a SATA drive. | Yes | Persistent |
| Data Disk | Additional disks for application data. Registered as SCSI drives. | No | Persistent |
| Temporary Disk | Local SSD for temporary data (pagefile, swap, temp files). | Varies by VM size | Not persistent — data lost on redeployment |
Important: Never store critical data on the temporary disk. It is local to the physical host and is lost when the VM is moved, resized, or redeployed.
Azure offers four managed disk types, each with different performance characteristics and price points:
| Disk Type | Backed By | Max IOPS | Max Throughput | Max Size | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ultra Disk | NVMe SSD | 160,000 | 4,000 MiB/s | 65,536 GiB | IO-intensive: SAP HANA, top-tier databases, transaction-heavy |
| Premium SSD v2 | NVMe SSD | 80,000 | 1,200 MiB/s | 65,536 GiB | Production: independently tunable IOPS, throughput, capacity |
| Premium SSD | SSD | 20,000 | 900 MiB/s | 32,767 GiB | Production workloads, databases, enterprise applications |
| Standard SSD | SSD | 6,000 | 750 MiB/s | 32,767 GiB | Web servers, lightly used applications, dev/test |
| Standard HDD | HDD | 2,000 | 500 MiB/s | 32,767 GiB | Backups, non-critical, infrequent access |
| Workload | Recommended Disk |
|---|---|
| Mission-critical databases (SAP HANA, Oracle) | Ultra Disk or Premium SSD v2 |
| Production databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) | Premium SSD or Premium SSD v2 |
| Web servers, application servers | Premium SSD or Standard SSD |
| Development and testing | Standard SSD |
| Backups, archival, non-critical | Standard HDD |
Premium SSD performance is determined by the disk size. Larger disks get more IOPS and throughput:
| Disk Size | IOPS | Throughput |
|---|---|---|
| P4 (32 GiB) | 120 | 25 MiB/s |
| P10 (128 GiB) | 500 | 100 MiB/s |
| P30 (1 TiB) | 5,000 | 200 MiB/s |
| P50 (4 TiB) | 7,500 | 250 MiB/s |
| P80 (32 TiB) | 20,000 | 900 MiB/s |
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