Create a new Persistent Disk volume

You can either create a blank Persistent Disk volume, or create a disk from a data source. You can use Persistent Disk as a boot disk for a virtual machine (VM) instance, or as a data disk that you attach to a VM.

This document explains how to create a blank, non-boot zonal Persistent Disk volume and attach it to your VM.

For other types of disk creation and addition, see the following:

• To create a boot disk that you can later use to create a VM, see Create a customized boot disk.

• To add a Google Cloud Hyperdisk disk to your VM, see Add Hyperdisk storage to a VM.

• To add a disk to a VM that is part of a managed instance group (MIG), see Updating VM configuration in a MIG.

Before you begin

• If you haven't already, then set up authentication. Authentication is the process by which your identity is verified for access to Google Cloud services and APIs. To run code or samples from a local development environment, you can authenticate to Compute Engine by selecting one of the following options:
  

  Select the tab for how you plan to use the samples on this page:

  Console

  When you use the Google Cloud console to access Google Cloud services and APIs, you don't need to set up authentication.

  gcloud

  1. Install the Google Cloud CLI, then initialize it by running the following command:

     gcloud init

  2. Set a default region and zone.

  Terraform

  To use the Terraform samples on this page in a local development environment, install and initialize the gcloud CLI, and then set up Application Default Credentials with your user credentials.

  1. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

  2. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

     gcloud init

  3. If you're using a local shell, then create local authentication credentials for your user account:

     gcloud auth application-default login

     You don't need to do this if you're using Cloud Shell.

  For more information, see Set up authentication for a local development environment.

  REST

  To use the REST API samples on this page in a local development environment, you use the credentials you provide to the gcloud CLI.

  Install the Google Cloud CLI, then initialize it by running the following command:

  gcloud init

  For more information, see Authenticate for using REST in the Google Cloud authentication documentation.

Restrictions

• During VM creation, you can attach up to 127 secondary non-boot zonal Persistent Disk volumes.
• You can have a total attached capacity of 257 TB per VM. For information about how to ensure maximum performance with large volumes, see Logical volume size.

Adding a non-boot disk to your VM

Create and attach a non-boot zonal disk by using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, or REST.

If you create a disk in the Google Cloud console, the default disk type is pd-balanced. If you create a disk using the gcloud CLI or REST, the default disk type is pd-standard.

You should specify a custom device name when attaching the disk to a VM. The name you specify is used to generate a symlink for the disk in the guest OS, making identification easier.

# Using pd-standard because it's the default for Compute Engine

resource "google_compute_disk" "default" {
  name = "disk-data"
  type = "pd-standard"
  zone = "us-west1-a"
  size = "5"
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "test_node" {
  name         = "test-node"
  machine_type = "f1-micro"
  zone         = "us-west1-a"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "debian-cloud/debian-11"
    }
  }
  attached_disk {
    source      = google_compute_disk.default.id
    device_name = google_compute_disk.default.name
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
    access_config {
      # Ephemeral IP
    }
  }

  # Ignore changes for persistent disk attachments
  lifecycle {
    ignore_changes = [attached_disk]
  }


}

After you create the new disk and attach it to a VM, you must format and mount the disk, so that the operating system can use the available storage space.

What's next

• Learn how to format and mount your new disks on a Linux VM.
• Learn how to format and mount your new disks on a Windows VM.
• Learn how to resize your Persistent Disk volumes.
• Learn how to regularly back up your disks using snapshots to prevent unintended data loss.
• Learn about regional Persistent Disk, which provide synchronous replication between two zones.