Shared Disks offer a high level of scalability and performance and are attached to many VMs with shared access.

Question 1: What's the sizing of a shared disk?

Answer:

You can create Shared Disks ranging in size from 1 TiB to 1000 TiB in increments of 1 TiB. Data stored on a Shared Disk will be preserved until explicitly deleted.

Question 2: Can I alter the size of a shared disk when attached to a VM?

Answer:

Yes, the provisioned capacity of shared disks can be resized—both increased and decreased—without detaching and reattaching them to a virtual machine (VM). However, a shared disk cannot be downsized below its used capacity.

Example:
If a shared disk is initially created with a size of 30 TiB and attached to a VM, its capacity can be increased up to 1000 TiB. The disk can also be downsized to 20 TiB, but if you have 20TiB of data on that disk, you cannot downsize it to lower than 20TiB.

Question 3: What's the I/O performance on a shared disk?

Answer:

The connection to each hypervisor (GPU, CPU or storage enhanced) is 200Gbps. However, the performance of the shared disk will be dependent on the size of the disk provisioned. Generally, the expected performance abides by the following guidelines:

Note: A certain amount of performance is dedicated to block storage traffic depending on the instance type documented in our VM specifications doc.

Question 4: What's the current pricing for a shared disk?

Answer:

Shared disks are charged based on provisioned capacity at $0.07/GiB/month.

Please see our pricing here in our public docs.

Question 5: How do I mount a shared disk?

Answer:

Please see our solution to mount shared disks in our public docs.

Question 6: How do I run a performance test on my shared disk?

Answer:

You can run benchmarks by following the steps outlined in our docs.

Question 7: Are there any limitations on what instance type a shared disk can be utilized on?

Answer:

Yes, shared-disks can only be attached to the largest instance types. For example, for an L40s instance, a shared-disk can only be attached to an L40s.10x and not to smaller sizes like L40s.1x to L40s.8x. We are actively working on improvements to support all instance sizes in the future.

For c1a instance types, shared-disks can already be attached to all sizes.

Question 8: Does Crusoe support the "mmap.MAP_SHARED" flags for shared disks?

Answer:

At this time, this is currently a limitation of our existing VAST-managed shared file system. However, we are actively collaborating with our engineering teams to explore solutions for enabling direct VM-to-VAST NFS mount capabilities in the future. You may find "mmap.MAP_PRIVATE" flag to be a supported flag at this time with the shared storage. For more information: https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors/issues/545. 

Additional information:

More information can be found on our public docs regarding shared disks.