Overview

Crusoe Cloud provides several high-performance, scalable storage options. In this section, we will give a high level overview of all the options.

Disk Types

Crusoe Cloud offers three types of disks: ephemeral disks, persistent disks and shared disks. Ephemeral disks are local to the virtual machine (on the same physical server). Persistent disks are remote block storage volumes that are attached to a virtual machine. Shared disks are shared network filesystems, designed to be accessed from many virtual machines concurrently.

Ephemeral Disks

Ephemeral disks offer the highest performance with no additional redundancy. Ephemeral disks have a lifecycle that is tied to the server associated with a given virtual machine. Local storage on GPU (a40,a100,h100,l40s,mi300x) and s1a instances are considered ephemeral disks. The disks are erased when the physical server reboots, or the VM is stopped and restarted, or if there are any other hardware or software failures. They are only suitable for use cases where data loss is tolerable, even if they are configured in a storage cluster like MinIO, Lustre or Ceph. If your data has a need to be protected, please use persistent or shared disks.

Note: if a VM is restarted from within the VM (e.g. using sudo reboot now) rather than by stopping and restarting the VM from the UI, CLI, or API, the disks will not be erased.

Persistent Disks

Persistent disks offer reasonable performance with high availability and durability. Persistent disks have a lifecycle independent of any given virtual machine, and can be attached or detached while the VM is running or stopped. Persistent disks can be attached to a given VM then detached at a later date, therefore storing data while a VM is stopped.

You can create individual persistent disks ranging in size from 1 GiB to 10 TiB and you can attach up to 16 disks per instance, including the OS disk which is automatically attached. Disks are persistent NVMe, which will preserve data even after detaching the disk from the instance.

OS Disks

VM operating systems are stored on a 128 GB persistent disk attached to a VM.

Shared Disks

Shared Disks offer a high level of scalability and performance and are attached to many VMs with shared access. Upon attaching a Shared Disk to one or more VMs, you can interface with the shared disk using standard NFS semantics. Like Persistent Disks, Shared Disks have a lifecycle independent of any given virtual machine, and can be attached or detached while the VM is running or stopped. Data is encrypted while in rest for shared disks, but not while in transit.

You can create Shared Disks ranging in size from 1 TiB to 1000 TiB in increments of 1 TiB and you can attach up to 4 disks per instance. Data stored on a Shared Disk will be preserved until explicitly deleted.

info

Shared disks are currently restricted and may not be available for immediate provisioning. If you require access, please contact our sales team to discuss your use case.

Limitations

1. Persistent disks can only be attached to a single instance at a time in read-write mode, but can be attached to multiple VMs in read-only mode. Multi-attach must be configured in the CLI or Terraform, as the Console UI only defaults to read-write attach.
2. Persistent and Shared disks can only be increased in size.
3. OS disks disks cannot currently be resized.
4. For GPU enabled VMs, Shared disks can currently only be attached to the largest VM size of each type, for example: l40s-48gb.10x or h100-80gb-sxm-ib.8x. For CPU only VMs (e.g. c1a or s1a), Shared Disks can be attached to any VM size.
5. Names of Shared disks can have a maximum length of 36 characters. Any names larger than 36 characters will cause the disk create operation to fail.

Quotas

By Persistent Disks, default quotas allow each organization can create up to 128 persistent disks, with a total capacity across all disks of 128 TiB.

For Shared Disks, default quotas allow each project to create up to 4 shared volumes by default, with a total capacity across shared volumes of 250 TiB.

Some accounts might have stricter quota restrictions than what is quoted above. If you need to learn about your quota or increase these quotas, please contact support.

Billing

Ephemeral disks are included in the VM pricing, and thus don't incur additional cost.

Shared Disks and Persistent disks (including OS disks) are billed regardless of whether or not they are attached to a running VM.

Type	Pricing
persistent-disk	$0.08/GiB/month for provisioned storage
shared-disk	$0.07/GiB/month for provisioned storage.