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So far, I was under the impression that

However, when looking at the Azure VM pricing page, I see that the instances include a column "disk size", e.g.

A0    1 core    0.75 GB RAM    20 GB Disk Size    EUR 11.29/mo
A1    1 core    1.75 GB RAM    40 GB Disk Size    EUR 25.10/mo
...

If Azure storage is billed on a per-use basis, what is the relevance of those "disk sizes"? Is it some "extra included" storage at no additional cost? Or is it a limit of how much storage you can add?

2 Answers 2

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The disk size you see on this list is related to the temporary storage. For example, a D1 virtual machine comes with 50GB Temporary Storage (D:) volume.

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All Windows VMs comes with 127GB Local Disk (C:) and all Linux with 30GB. The Temp volume depends on the size of the VM, but not matter the size, you don't pay it.

What do you pay?

For Virtual Machines, you consume Page & Disk Blob Storage.

Standard Storage - You pay what you consume. In my example, I'm paying only about 12GB, which is the size of system and softwares in my C: volume.

Premium Storage (SSD) - You pay for the whole disk no matter if you are using only a portion of it.

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    Do note that this temporary space is on a local hard drive on the Azure node hosting the machine so it is pretty fast to access. But since this is ephemeral, be careful of storing data that you may want to persist across service heals, machine resizes, stop-deallocations etc.
    – proteus
    Nov 7, 2016 at 23:22
  • Note: this really is ALL Windows VMs (at this time) whether you choose SSD or HDD for the OS. This may seem counter-intuitive. Disc sizes for managed (extra storage) do however based on the drive technology : docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/…
    – Simon
    Feb 24, 2017 at 20:57
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When you create the VM it will use a storage account for the VM's OS disk (of the mentioned sizes), you can add (and pay for) more storage if you'd like. You will be charged for the OS disk (but not the temporary disk you'll also get). If you deallocate the VM you wont pay for the CPU and Memory but will still be charged for the storage.

See FAQ section here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/

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