Azure Disks—block-level storage volumes managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines—now have new 4-GiB, 8-GiB, and 16-GiB sizes available on both premium and standard SSDs. The new disk sizes introduced on standard SSD disk provide the most cost-efficient SSD offering in the cloud, providing consistent disk performance at the lowest cost per GB. We’ve also increased the performance target for all standard SSD disks of 64-GiB or less (E6) to 500 IOPS and 60 MiB/second, matching that with standard HDDs. It’s an ideal replacement for HDD-based disk storage from either on-premises or cloud.
In addition, we now support bursting on Azure premium SSD disks in all Azure regions in the public cloud. With bursting, even the smallest premium SSD disks at 4-GiB can now achieve up to 3,500 IOPS and 170 MiB/second, and better accommodate spiky workloads. It can be best used for OS disks to accelerate virtual machine (VM) boot or data disks to accommodate spiky traffic. To learn more about disk bursting, read the premium SSD bursting article.