Comparing Azure Managed Disk Storage Offerings

• Azure Managed Disks provide attached storage for Azure VMs with several options to meet size, performance, and redundancy requirements.
• Standard SSD and Premium SSD meet the requirements of most scenarios with the broadest range of capabilities and redundancy.
• Ultra SSD, while offering high performance, lacks support for several capabilities and has limited use compared to other offerings.

Azure Managed Disks provide block-level storage for Azure VMs and behave similarly to a physical disk attached to an on-premises server. Azure Managed Disks are offered in four types: Standard hard-disk drive (HDD), Standard solid-state drive (SSD), Premium SSD, and Ultra SSD. While Standard HDD offers the lowest pricing at the cost of performance, and Ultra SSD offers the highest performance and capacity at the highest cost, Standard and Premium SSD managed disk types provide the capacity, performance, capabilities, and redundancy to meet most use cases.

Managed Disks Overview

Managed disks are recommended by Microsoft for Azure VM disk storage, and Standard SSD and Ultra SSD disks are available only as managed disks. Compared to unmanaged disks, which use virtual hard disk (VHD) files in Azure page blob storage, managed disks have reduced management overhead and more capabilities for redundancy and security. However, unlike page blob storage, managed disks must be allocated in advance and do not offer the hot, cold, and archival tiers of page blobs.