High-Performance Storage

Premium storage tier for demanding AI workloads with up to 3x throughput and 4x IOPS.

High-Performance Storage is a network volume tier designed for data-intensive AI workloads. Its parallel storage architecture delivers high throughput and low latency under heavy concurrent load, even when thousands of processes access it simultaneously.

The storage uses Solidigm high-density SSDs optimized for AI data pipelines.

Performance comparison

In internal benchmarks, High-Performance Storage delivers up to 3x the throughput and 4x the IOPS of Standard Storage on parallel operations.

	Standard Storage	High-Performance Storage
Best for	General-purpose work, development, cost-sensitive jobs	Training, fine-tuning, latency-sensitive inference
Throughput	High	Up to 3x higher
IOPS	High	Up to 4x higher
Concurrency	Moderate	Optimized for massive parallelism
Relative cost	Lower	Premium

Both tiers are fully supported. Choose based on whether storage performance sits on the critical path of your workload.

When to choose High-Performance Storage

If your GPUs ever sit idle waiting on data (slow dataloaders, long checkpoint writes, sluggish model loads) you’re a candidate for High-Performance Storage. If storage isn’t your bottleneck, Standard Storage is the cost-effective choice.

Use case	Why it helps
Training	Feeds GPUs at the rate they can consume data, preventing I/O bottlenecks and reducing training time.
Fine-tuning and checkpointing	Speeds up write-heavy operations like checkpoints, so jobs spend more time computing.
Inference	Cuts model load time from a central volume, lowering endpoint cold-start latency.

Create a High-Performance volume

High-Performance Storage is available as a network volume type in select data centers.

Web console

1. Navigate to Storage > Network Volumes in the Runpod console.
2. Click New Network Volume.
3. Select a data center. Data centers that support High-Performance Storage display a purple diamond icon.
4. Under Storage Type, select High-Performance.
5. Enter a name and set the volume size in GB. The console displays per-GB and total monthly cost as you adjust.
6. Click Create Network Volume.

REST API

curl --request POST \
  --url https://rest.runpod.io/v1/networkvolumes \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer RUNPOD_API_KEY' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  "name": "my-hps-volume",
  "size": 100,
  "dataCenterId": "US-KS-2",
  "storageType": "high-performance"
}'

See the network volumes API reference for details.

Attach to your workloads

High-Performance volumes work across the platform like standard network volumes.

• : Attach during Pod creation, or from the volume manager for existing setups.
• : Attach to an endpoint to speed up model loading and reduce cold-start latency. See Network volumes for Serverless.
• s: New clusters can be provisioned with High-Performance Storage by default.

Pricing

High-Performance Storage is priced per-GB at a premium to Standard Storage. The console displays per-GB and total monthly cost as you configure a volume.

Exact pricing varies by data center. Check the volume creation flow in the console for current rates.

FAQ

Is Standard Storage going away?

No. Standard Storage remains fully supported and is the recommended choice for general-purpose work. High-Performance Storage is an additional tier for performance-sensitive workloads.

Which data centers support High-Performance Storage?

Multiple US and European data centers support High-Performance Storage, with more rolling out over time. Supported data centers display a purple diamond icon in the network volume creation flow.

Can I migrate an existing Standard volume to High-Performance?

Direct migration is not currently supported. To move data to a High-Performance volume, create a new High-Performance volume and transfer your data using the S3-compatible API or runpodctl.

Next steps

Network volumes

Learn more about network volume management and features.

S3-compatible API

Manage files without launching compute resources.