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Performance tiers for managed disks

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Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets

The performance of your Azure managed disk is set when you create your disk, in the form of its performance tier. The performance tier determines the IOPS and throughput your managed disk has. When you set the provisioned size of your disk, a performance tier is automatically selected. The performance tier can be changed at deployment or afterwards, without changing the size of the disk.

Changing the performance tier allows you to prepare for and meet higher demand without using your disk's bursting capability. It can be more cost-effective to change your performance tier rather than rely on bursting, depending on how long the additional performance is necessary. This is ideal for events that temporarily require a consistently higher level of performance, like holiday shopping, performance testing, or running a training environment. To handle these events, you can use a higher performance tier for as long as you need it. You can then return to the original tier when you no longer need the additional performance.

Restrictions

  • This feature is currently supported only for premium SSDs.
  • This feature isn't currently supported with shared disks.
  • The P60, P70, and P80 performance tiers can only be used by disks that are larger than 4,096 GiB.
  • A disk's performance tier can be downgraded only once every 12 hours.
  • The system does not return Performance Tier for disks created before June 2020. You can take advantage of Performance Tier for an older disk by updating it with the baseline Tier.

How it works

When you first deploy or provision a disk, the baseline performance tier for that disk is set based on the provisioned disk size. You can use a performance tier higher than the original baseline to meet higher demand. When you no longer need that performance level, you can return to the initial baseline performance tier.

Billing impact

Your billing changes as your performance tier changes. For example, if you provision a P10 disk (128 GiB), your baseline performance tier is set as P10 (500 IOPS and 100 MBps). You'll be billed at the P10 rate. You can upgrade the tier to match the performance of P50 (7,500 IOPS and 250 MBps) without increasing the disk size. During the time of the upgrade, you'll be billed at the P50 rate. When you no longer need the higher performance, you can return to the P10 tier. The disk will once again be billed at the P10 rate.

For billing information, see Managed disk pricing.

What tiers can be changed

The following table depicts which tiers each baseline performance tier can upgrade to.

Disk size Baseline performance tier Can be upgraded to
4 GiB P1 P2, P3, P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
8 GiB P2 P3, P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
16 GiB P3 P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
32 GiB P4 P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
64 GiB P6 P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
128 GiB P10 P15, P20, P30, P40, P50
256 GiB P15 P20, P30, P40, P50
512 GiB P20 P30, P40, P50
1 TiB P30 P40, P50
2 TiB P40 P50
4 TiB P50 None
8 TiB P60 P70, P80
16 TiB P70 P80
32 TiB P80 None

Next steps

To learn how to change your performance tier, see portal or PowerShell/CLI articles.