LearnGlossary

What is Premium SSD in Azure?

Updated 26 October 2026 · Published by Zoorik

Premium SSD in Azure is a solid-state drive (SSD) type of Azure managed disk. It’s for production apps that need high performance and low latency.

From Microsoft’s docs:

  • It’s designed for single-digit millisecond latency, 99.9% of the time.
  • It can be the operating system (OS) disk or a data disk.
  • It needs a virtual machine (VM) size that supports premium storage.

What is Premium SSD LRS?

LRS means locally redundant storage. Azure writes your data three times in one data center. It guards against server rack and drive failures, not an availability zone failure.

A disk held back by its VM

Base input/output operations per second (IOPS) depend on disk size. Azure Premium SSD IOPS run from 120 to 20,000. The VM has a limit too.

Microsoft’s example app needs 4,000 IOPS:

  • Its 1 TiB Premium SSD can deliver 5,000.
  • But its DS1 VM is limited to 3,200.
  • So the app gets 3,200 and runs slower.
The VM's limit caps the disk, so the app gets 3,200 IOPS Microsoft's example: an app on a DS1 VM with a 1 TiB Premium SSD. Three bars on one shared scale from 0 to 5,000 IOPS, cut by a dashed line at 3,200 IOPS labelled DS1 VM limit. The top bar, an outline labelled 1 TiB Premium SSD can deliver, runs to 5,000. The middle bar, labelled the app needs, runs to 4,000. The bottom bar, labelled the app gets, stops at the line at 3,200, and a hatched part out to 4,000 is labelled 800 short. The VM's limit caps the disk, so the app gets 3,200 IOPS Microsoft's example: an app on a DS1 VM with a 1 TiB Premium SSDDS1 VM limit3,2001 TiB Premium SSD can deliver5,000The app needs4,000The app gets800 short3,20001,0002,0003,0004,0005,000IOPS
Microsoft’s own example: the 1 TiB Premium SSD can deliver 5,000 IOPS and the app needs 4,000, but the DS1 VM is limited to 3,200, so the app gets 3,200, which is 800 IOPS short of what it needs.

Why it matters for your cloud cost

  • You pay for the size tier the disk rounds up to, however little data it holds.
  • On-demand bursting adds an hourly fee and burst transaction costs. Without it, transactions are free.
  • Premium SSD v2 is charged per GiB instead, plus IOPS above 3,000 and throughput above 125 MB/s.

For web servers, development and testing, Microsoft suggests Standard SSD.

Amoeba moves a VM’s data disks onto one pool sized to your data, then rightsizes it autonomously. On Azure, it uses Premium SSD v2 where the region and zone offer it, and Premium SSD otherwise.

The free assessment works out your own figure.

Read next: Premium SSD vs Standard SSD on Azure: what you pay for

Sources: Microsoft Learn, “Select a disk type for Azure IaaS VMs” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Understand Azure Disk Storage billing” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Redundancy options for Azure managed disks” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Azure premium storage: Design for high performance” (opens in a new tab).

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