Cloud disks provided by Alibaba Cloud provide persistent data storage space for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances. A cloud disk can be attached to an ECS instance as the system disk that stores operating system-related data or a data disk that stores application-related data. Cloud disks are essential for running ECS instances. This topic describes how to create and use a cloud disk.
Procedure
System disk: You can create a system disk only when you create an ECS instance. You cannot separately create a system disk
Data disk: You can separately create a data disk for an existing ECS instance or create a data disk when you create an ECS instance.
In this example, a data disk is separately created, as shown in the following figure.
Create a data disk.
You can create a subscription or pay-as-you-go data disk. For more information, see Create a disk.
You can create a data disk with data from a snapshot. For more information, see Create a disk from a snapshot.
Attach the created data disk to an ECS instance.
For more information, see Attach a data disk.
(Conditionally required) Initialize the data disk.
If you created an empty data disk and attached it to an ECS instance, you must create partitions and file systems for the disk before you can use it.
For information about initialization scenarios, see Overview.
For information about how to initialize a Linux data disk, see the following topics:
For information about how to initialize a Windows data disk, see the following topics:
Related operations
When you use a disk, you can modify the disk attributes, change the disk category, encrypt the disk, or resize the disk based on your business requirements.
If you no longer require a cloud disk, you can detach the disk from the associated instance and release the disk to reduce costs.
For more information, see Overview of Block Storage.