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In GCP, I tried to create a server with a local SSD (because the performance is much better). However, I get the following error: "Boot disk cannot be local attached storage."

Surely the answer is "GCP doesn't support this." But there were no hits when I did a Google search, so I thought I'd at least ask the question and get confirmation that this is not possible. Does anyone know if it is in the works?

carbocation
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  • Just curious, is there a reason you want local SSD specifically for a boot disk? – rvs Aug 16 '18 at 12:47
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    For the case where I otherwise don't need to map extra drives, this would just simplify the process of spinning up a high-performance GCP VM with minimal config. – carbocation Aug 16 '18 at 16:03
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    There are also plenty of things that, by default, operate on or log to the boot drive. A more minor point is that if I just need the 375GB disk for ephemeral jobs, I may not need to spend money on the 10GB of persistent disk that I don't intend to use. (That's a minor point, since 10GB is very cheap.) – carbocation Aug 16 '18 at 16:05
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    I see. Yeah - this makes sense. Thank you for explanation! – rvs Aug 17 '18 at 17:40

1 Answers1

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Local SSD disks are not designed to be used as a boot disk for GCE instances.

There are 3 types of disks : Standard, SSD and local SSD. While SSDs are designed to give you a higher number of IOPs ( Input/output operations per second) , local SSDs have an even higher throughput and lower latency than SSD persistent disks because they are attached to the physical hardware.
However, the data that you store on a local SSD persists only until you stop or delete the instance.
Typically a local SSD is used as a swap disk, a disk for processing space, or to store low value data.

You will find extensive details on local SSD on GCP documentation at this link 1.

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