Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
Microsoft positions Premium SSD v2 as generally less costly than Premium SSD, not Standard SSD, and its capacity costs more per GiB than Standard SSD. Savings over Standard SSD arise mainly for disks that are performance-constrained, pay significant transaction charges, or are heavily oversized because of Standard SSD's fixed size tiers. For lightly used disks, Standard SSD usually remains the cheaper option.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Standard SSD disks are billed per provisioned size tier per month, plus per-transaction charges up to an hourly cap. Premium SSD v2 is billed per provisioned GiB, with a baseline of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s included and extra charges for IOPS and throughput set above that baseline. Compare the total capacity, transaction, and performance cost of both options before migrating.
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- Identify Managed Disks using the Standard SSD offering that are eligible for migration to Premium SSD v2
- Review workload performance requirements to confirm suitability for Premium SSD v2 characteristics
- Verify regional availability of Premium SSD v2 before planning migration
- Evaluate disk attachment patterns and application dependencies to ensure compatibility during transition
- Validate proposed changes with infrastructure teams to align with performance, availability, and cost goals
How to fix
How to remove the waste.
Migrate eligible Standard SSD data disks to Premium SSD v2 where the cost comparison favors it or the extra performance is needed. Premium SSD v2 can't be used as an OS disk, doesn't support host caching, and in most regions with availability zones can only be attached to zonal VMs. Direct conversion requires stopping (deallocating) and restarting the VM, so schedule it in a maintenance window; migration from incremental snapshots is also supported. Update infrastructure provisioning standards to default to Premium SSD v2 where appropriate to maintain ongoing optimization.
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.