Local SSD Cheat Sheet

• Is a local solid-state drive storage physically attached to the server that hosts your virtual machine (VM) instances.

Local SSD Features

• Tightly coupled to a physical server that offers superior performance, very high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and very low latency compared to other block storage options.
• Each standard Local SSD disk provides 375 GB of storage. You can attach up to 32 disks for a total of 12 TB per general purpose instance.
• Titanium SSD
  • Newer machine series (like C4, Z3, G4) use higher-performance Titanium SSDs, with disk sizes up to 3 TiB and total storage up to 72 TiB.

• You can format and mount multiple Local SSD partitions into a single logical volume.
• Local SSDs are designed for temporary storage use cases which makes them suitable for workloads like:
  • Media Rendering
  • Data Analytics
  • Caches
  • Processing Space
  • Microsoft SQL Server tempdb and Windows pagefile
• Performance
  • Achieve up to 3.2M read / 1.6M write IOPS and 12,480 MiB/s read throughput on general purpose instances. Storage-optimized instances can reach 6M IOPS and 36,000 MiB/s read throughput.
• NVMe Interface
  • Use the NVMe interface for the highest performance. Performance is lower with the SCSI interface.
• Date stored in the GCP infrastructure is automatically encrypted at rest including Local SSDs too.
• The performance boosts you get from Local SSDs require certain trade-offs like availability, durability, and flexibility. Because of these, the storage is not automatically replicated and all data on the local SSD may be lost if the instance stops for any reason.
• Data Persistence
  • Data on Local SSD is ephemeral and lost by default when the instance stops, is suspended, or terminated.
• Preview Feature
  • You can optionally preserve Local SSD data when stopping or suspending an instance (not available for Titanium SSD). Data is copied to durable storage; you are billed for this storage while the instance is stopped.
• Data also persists through guest OS reboots and live migration events. It does not persist for Spot or preemptible VM preemptions.

Local SSD Cheat Sheet References:

https://cloud.google.com/local-ssd
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd