Persistent Disks come in four types at different price points and performance profiles. We've designed these disk types based on years of working with customers to understand the range of uses of our Persistent Disks. Understand the price and performance of each disk type.

Persistent Disk allows you to flexibly resize your block storage while it’s in use by one or more virtual machines. Performance scales automatically with size, so you can resize your existing persistent disks or add more persistent disks to an instance to meet your performance and storage requirements—all with no application downtime.

Use Disk Clones to quickly bring up staging environments from production, create new disks for backup verification or data export jobs, and create disks in a different project.

Local SSDs are physically attached to the server that hosts your VM instance. This tight coupling offers superior performance, very high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and very low latency compared to other block storage options. Local SSDs are often used for temporary storage such as caches or scratch processing space.

Automatically encrypt your data before it travels outside of your instance to Persistent Disk storage. Each Persistent Disk remains encrypted with system-defined keys or with customer-supplied keys. Google distributes Persistent Disk data across multiple physical disks, ensuring the ultimate level of security. When a disk is deleted, we discard the keys, rendering the data irretrievable.

Your storage exists independently from your virtual machine instances, so you can detach or move your disks to keep your data even after you delete your instances.

Create snapshots to periodically back up data from your zonal or regional Persistent Disks. To reduce the risk of unexpected data loss, consider the best practice of setting up a snapshot schedule to ensure your data is backed up on a regular schedule.

Use a Machine Images to store all the configuration, metadata, permissions, and data from one or more disks for a VM instance running on Compute Engine. The VM instance that you use to create a machine image is referred to as a source instance.

Asynchronous Replication provides low recovery point objective (RPO) and low recovery time objective (RTO) block storage replication for cross-region disaster recovery (DR). In the unlikely event of a regional outage, Persistent Disk Asynchronous Replication enables you to failover your data to a secondary region so you can quickly restart your workload.

Regional Persistent Disk is a storage option that provides synchronous replication of data between two zones in the same region. Regional persistent disks offer zero RPO and low RTO and are a good building block to implement high availability services in Compute Engine.