Block Volume Performance Options

Elastic Performance

When you create block storage, you can optionally enable High performance. By default, the volume will have Balanced performance. The volume performance setting cannot be changed after the volume is created.

• Balanced performance: The Balanced performance option is the default for new and existing block and boot volumes. This performance option provides a good balance between performance and cost savings for most workloads, including workloads that perform random I/O such as boot volumes. Balanced performance is provided by the DE3-24C Disk Shelf.

• High performance: The High performance option is recommended for workloads with higher I/O requirements. High performance is provided by the DE3-24P Disk Shelf.

Performance Limitations and Considerations

The following performance results are for unformatted data volumes.

• Throughput performance on compute instances depends on the network bandwidth that is available to the compute instance, and further limited by that bandwidth for the volume.

• If Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Microsoft Defender ATP) is enabled in an instance, it has a significant negative impact on disk I/O performance. However, carefully consider the security implications of disabling Microsoft Defender ATP.

• Block volume performance is per volume, so when a block volume is attached to multiple compute instances, the performance is shared across all the attached compute instances.