Storage Overview
Paperspace offers several kinds of storage depending on your needs.
Secure, resilient, and distributed
Block Storage
Volumes provide a block-level storage device for use as the primary system drive on a Core machine. Volumes appear to the operating system as locally attached storage which can be partitioned and formatted according to your needs. Volumes offer cost-effective storage that is ideal for a broad range of workloads. They are well suited to both applications that rely on random reads and writes, and to throughput-intensive applications that perform long, continuous reads and writes. These volumes deliver single-digit millisecond latencies and the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time. The throughput limit for volumes is 128 MiB/s.
- Regions: Volumes are region-specific.
- Media: Volumes are backed by SSDs.
- Sizes: Volumes can be created in sizes ranging from 50 GB to 2 TB.
Shared Drives
Shared Drives are designed to provide a data source accessible to multiple machines concurrently. Drives are most commonly used to share files between machines and behave similarly to a local office file server (commonly referred to as network-attached storage or NAS). Drives are mounted using standard tools within the OS. Drives provide a file system interface and file system access control such as strong consistency and file locking. All file systems deliver a consistent baseline performance of 50 MB/s per TB of storage, all file systems (regardless of size) can burst to 100 MB/s.
- Regions: Drives are region-specific.
- Media: Drives are backed by SSDs.
- Sizes: Drives can be created in sizes ranging from 250 GB to 2 TB.*
* Large sizes up to 16TB are available upon request.
Storage Pricing
There is an additional fee for storage on virtual machines, which is detailed in the Block Storage and Shared Drives articles.
When adding storage to a machine, there is no upfront fee for hourly storage. Monthly storage, however, is pre-paid.
Hourly Storage Pricing
If the storage is hourly, storage consumption is calculated at the end of every billing cycle, which takes place at the beginning of the calendar month. Each invoice will contain the number of hours and rate at which storage was billed for the previous billing cycle.
Monthly Storage Pricing
If the storage is monthly, the first month is invoiced upfront as a prorated fee for the remainder of the current month at the time of purchase or upgrade.
For example, if we create a new machine on the 20th day of the month with 100 GB of storage, we will be invoiced immediately for the remaining month of storage, which in this example would be approximately 10 / 30 x $7 = ~$2.33.
When the billing cycle runs ~10 days later at the beginning of the next month, we will pre-pay for the next month in its entirety.