In a previous post, I showed you how to implement the new Azure Ultra Disks. Today, I want to show you how fast they really are by running performance tests and comparing them with the other disks available in Azure.

Test Environment

VM size: Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory)
Location: North Europe (Zone 3)
Used tool: DiskSpd

Disks Sizes
Ultra Disk: 32 GB / 9200 IOPS / 2000 MBps
Premium SSD: P4
Standard SSD: E4
Standard HDD: S4

Azure disks performance

I will perform two tests on each type of hard disk, using the Diskspd tool, Diskspd is a command-line utility and, as such, has a long list of available parameters. If you want to know more about the parameters used in the following tests, check out this link.

Large area random concurrent reads of 4KB blocks

The explanation of the values and parameters used for this test are the following:

ParameterDescription
-c2GCreate files of the specified size.
-b4KBlock size in bytes or KB, MB, or GB.
-rRandom I/O.
-o32The number of outstanding I/O requests per-target per-thread.
-W60Warmup time in seconds.
-d60Duration of measurement period in seconds
-ShDisable both software caching and hardware write caching.
testfile.dat The target file used for testing.
The results for each type of Azure managed disks are shown below.

Ultra Disk

Azure Ultra disk performance

Premium SSD

Azure Premium Disks Performance

Standard SSD

Azure SSD Disks Performance

Standard HDD

Azure Standard Disks Performance

Small area concurrent writes of 4KB blocks

The explanation of the values and parameters used for this test are the following:

ParameterDescription
-C100bCreate files of the specified size.
-w100Percentage of write requests to issue.
-b4KBlock size in bytes or KB, MB, or GB.
-o32The number of outstanding I/O requests per-target per-thread.
-F8The total number of threads.
-T1bStride size between I/O operations performed on the same target by different threads in bytes, KB, MB or GB.
-s8bSequential stride size, offset between subsequent I/O operations in bytes, KB, MB, or GB.
-W60Warmup time in seconds.
-d60Duration of measurement period in seconds
-ShDisable both software caching and hardware write caching.
testfile.dat The target file used for testing.
The results for each type of Azure managed disks are shown below.

Ultra Disk

Azure Ultra Disks Performance

Premium SSD

Azure Premium Disks Performance

Standard SSD

Azure SSD Disks Performance

Standard HDD

Azure Standard Disks Performance

As you can see the difference in performance is notorious. I hope you find this information interesting and see you in the next post.

If you want to know more about DiskSpd tool, check out this link: https://github.com/Microsoft/diskspd/wiki/Command-line-and-parameters