Service tiers

This page describes the differences between the various service tiers that Filestore offers and gives guidance on how to select between them.

Filestore offers Basic HDD, Basic SSD, and High Scale SSD service tiers. Each tier has different capacity options and performance levels to fit different use cases. The following table shows a comparison of the tiers:

Specification Basic HDD Basic SSD High Scale SSD
Minimum capacity 1 TB 2.5 TB 60 TB
Maximum capacity 63.9 TB 63.9 TB 320 TB
Scaling direction Up only Up only Up and down
R/W Throughput (MB/s)1 100/100 1,200/350 3,000/660
R/W IOPS1 600/1,000 60,000/25,000 90,000/30,000
Data recovery Backups (manual only) Backups (manual only) None
Use cases
  • Lower capacity
  • Limited capacity growth
  • Lower capacity
  • Limited capacity growth
  • High performance
  • HPC
  • Enterprise
  • Many clients
  • High expected capacity growth
  • Flexibility to shrink and grow capacity
Price per month for the minimum instance2 $204.80 ($0.20/GB) $768.00 ($0.30/GB) $18,432.00 ($0.30/GB)

Selecting a tier

When selecting a tier for your Filestore instance, capacity is the main determining factor on whether you should select Basic tier or High Scale tier. If you don't anticipate that your instance will require more than 63.9 TB of storage, then select Basic tier. If you anticipate needing more than that, select High Scale tier.

A second consideration when selecting a tier is performance. High Scale tier provides higher overall performance in multi-client scenarios. If your workloads are performance-critical and spread over multiple clients, you may still choose to deploy a High Scale tier instance for its performance benefits.

Once an Filestore instance is created, the tier cannot be changed. If you need to change tiers, you must create a new instance and copy the data from your original instance onto the new instance. We recommend selecting High Scale tier if there's a chance that you'll need the extra capacity in the future.

Quota

Quota for Filestore instances varies by region and tier. High Scale and Basic instances each have their own quotas. High Scale SSD quota starts at 0. Before you can create a High Scale SSD instance, you must first make and be approved for a High Scale SSD quota increase request.

To see your available quota, go to the Quotas page. If you need to request additional quota, see Requesting Quota Increases.

  1. Reflects the performance numbers for a Filestore instance with minimum capacity. For more information about performance, see the Performance page. ↩

  2. Reflects the estimated pricing for an Filestore instance with minimum capacity and located in region us-central1. For more information about pricing, see the Pricing page. ↩