Alibaba Cloud Enhanced SSD (ESSD) PL-X disks provide high performance across multiple dimensions, including ultra-high input/output operations per second (IOPS), ultra-high throughput, and ultra-low latency. When you configure the capacity of an ESSD PL-X disk, you can also customize its IOPS based on your business needs. This topic describes the specifications, billing, configuration, and limits of ESSD PL-X disks.
Introduction to cloud disks
Disk specifications
The following table describes the specifications of ESSD PL-X disks.
Category | Disk property | Specifications |
Storage capacity | Capacity range per disk (GiB) | 40 to 32,768 |
Disk performance | Single I/O size (KiB) | 4 |
Average latency of random writes (ms) | 0.03 | |
IOPS per disk | min{Provisioned IOPS, 3,000,000} | |
Throughput per disk (MB/s) | min{4 KB × provisioned IOPS/1024, 12,288} |
Provisioned: Provisioned performance means that you can specify and separately purchase the maximum IOPS and maximum throughput for a disk based on your business needs, without changing the storage capacity. The performance is measured and purchased in IOPS. Each IOPS comes with 4 KB of throughput.
The maximum performance of a single disk is 1,000 IOPS/GiB. For more information about how to test the performance of an ESSD PL-X disk, see Test the performance of an ESSD PL-X disk.
Scenarios
ESSD PL-X disks are suitable for online transactional processing (OLTP) databases and key-value (KV) databases that have high requirements for disk performance, such as IOPS, throughput, and latency.
Billing
Billing items and rules
The fees for an ESSD PL-X disk include the disk capacity fee (charged upon creation) and the provisioned performance fee for configured IOPS. The provisioned performance fee is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. For more information about the billing rules, see Elastic Block Storage billing.
Pricing
For more information about the pricing of ESSD PL-X disks, see the Elastic Block Storage pricing page or the .
Limits
Region limits
ESSD PL-X disks are available only in Zone M of China (Chengdu). To use ESSD PL-X disks in other regions or zones, contact your Alibaba Cloud sales representative.
Instance type limits
ESSD PL-X disks can be attached only to ECS instances of the g8ise instance family. For more information about this instance family, see g8ise, a storage-enhanced general-purpose instance family.
Feature limits
Compared with ESSDs at performance levels 0 to 3 (PL0 to PL3), ESSD PL-X disks have the following limits:
Limit | Support for ESSD PL-X | Is ESSD PL0-PL3 supported? |
Create a disk | Yes | Yes |
Deleting a cloud disk | Yes | Yes |
View or modify disk properties | Yes | Yes |
Cloud disk encryption | No | Yes |
Enable multi-attach | No | Yes |
Asynchronous replication | No | Yes |
Create a snapshot | No | Yes |
Reset a disk | No | Yes |
Initialize a disk | Yes | Yes |
Replace a system disk | No | Yes |
Expand a disk | Yes | Yes |
Attach a disk | Yes | Yes |
Change the billing method of a disk | Yes Note You can change the billing method only for the storage capacity. The provisioned performance supports only the pay-as-you-go billing method. | Yes |
Change the category of a disk | No Note You can change the IOPS of a disk only by changing the disk category. For more information, see Change the category of a disk. | Yes |
Modify the performance level | No | Yes |
Configure the provisioned performance of a disk
You can customize the IOPS of an ESSD PL-X disk to improve its performance based on your business needs. You can do this when you create an ESSD PL-X disk or add an ESSD PL-X data disk during ECS instance creation in the ECS console. For more information about how to create an ECS instance and a disk, see Create an instance on the Custom Launch tab and Create a data disk.
This section describes how to create an ESSD PL-X disk and customize its IOPS in the ECS console.
In the upper-left corner of the page, select a region and resource group.
Click Create a disk.
On the page that appears, set the parameters for the ESSD PL-X disk.
Set Disk Type to ESSD PL-X and configure the disk capacity.
Provisioned Performance Fee is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. Configure the IOPS as needed. To ensure that the disk is created, make sure that the provisioned performance is at least 1,000 IOPS.
NoteAfter the disk is created, you can change its IOPS by changing the disk category. For more information, see Change the category of a disk.
For more information about other parameters, see Create a data disk.
Billing example for an ESSD PL-X disk
The following example describes the performance metrics and fees for an ESSD PL-X disk with configured provisioned IOPS.
Assume that you purchase a 1-month subscription ESSD PL-X disk that has a capacity of 2,048 GiB and a provisioned performance of 2,000,000 IOPS.
The performance metrics of the disk are as follows:
Disk IOPS: 2,000,000
Disk throughput: 4 KB × provisioned IOPS/1,024 = 4 KB × 2,000,000/1,024/1,024 = 7.62 GB/s
For the throughput calculation formula, see Introduction to disks.
The fees for the disk for one month are calculated as follows. For more information about the pricing of ESSD PL-X disks, see the Elastic Block Storage pricing page or the .
Disk capacity fee: Disk capacity × Unit price of disk capacity × Subscription duration = 2,048 × 1 × 1 = CNY 2,048
Disk performance fee: Unit price of disk performance × Provisioned IOPS × Subscription duration = (CNY 0.075/24/30) per hour × 2,000,000 × (30 × 24) hours = CNY 150,000
Total fee: Disk capacity fee + Disk performance fee = 2,048 + 150,000 = CNY 152,048