Standard HDD Managed Disks

Standard HDD managed disks are the most cost-effective storage option, designed for workloads that require low transaction rates and don't have stringent performance requirements. They are ideal for dev/test environments, non-critical applications, and backup scenarios.

Key Features and Benefits

Cost-Effective: Lowest cost per GB among Azure Managed Disks.
Durability: Designed for high durability with redundancy.
Scalability: Easily scale up or down your storage capacity.
SLA: Offers a 99.9% availability SLA.

Performance Characteristics

Standard HDD disks offer the lowest IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput compared to Standard SSD and Premium SSD disks. The performance varies based on the disk size.

IOPS: Generally ranges from 50 to 500 IOPS.
Throughput: Typically between 60 and 200 MB/s.

Note: For workloads requiring higher IOPS or consistent performance, consider Standard SSD or Premium SSD managed disks.

Use Cases

Development and testing environments.
Backup and restore operations.
Archival storage.
Applications with low I/O demands.
Large, sequential I/O workloads where latency is not critical.

Creating Standard HDD Disks

You can create Standard HDD managed disks using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or Azure Resource Manager templates.

Using Azure CLI

To create a Standard HDD managed disk using Azure CLI:

az disk create --resource-group <your-resource-group> --name <your-disk-name> --size-gb <size-in-gb> --sku Standard_LRS

Replace <your-resource-group>, <your-disk-name>, and <size-in-gb> with your specific values.

Using Azure PowerShell

To create a Standard HDD managed disk using Azure PowerShell:

New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName Standard_LRS -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB <size-in-gb>
            New-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName <your-resource-group> -DiskName <your-disk-name> -DiskConfig $diskConfig

Replace <your-resource-group>, <your-disk-name>, and <size-in-gb> with your specific values.

Pricing

Standard HDD disks are priced based on the provisioned capacity and the number of I/O operations. Refer to the Azure Managed Disks pricing page for the most up-to-date information.

Tip: For cost optimization, use Standard HDDs for less critical workloads and consider reserved instances for long-term commitments.

Limitations

Lower IOPS and throughput compared to SSD-based disks.
Higher latency for random I/O operations.