Persistent Storage
Every Carolina Cloud instance has a dedicated NVMe-backed disk. This storage is persistent — your data survives stop/restart cycles and is only destroyed when you delete the instance.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”- Storage is provisioned at instance creation and cannot currently be expanded after the fact.
- Disk size ranges from 10 GiB to 2,000 GiB depending on host availability.
- Storage is billed at $0.0001/GiB/hr regardless of instance state (running or stopped).
- When you stop an instance, compute billing stops but storage billing continues, preserving your data.
Performance
Section titled “Performance”All storage is backed by NVMe SSDs on the host machine. There is no network-attached storage layer — your disk is local to the host, delivering bare-metal I/O performance.
Choosing a disk size
Section titled “Choosing a disk size”- Development / notebooks: 50–100 GiB is typically sufficient.
- Data science with large datasets: 200–500 GiB gives room for datasets, model checkpoints, and intermediate results.
- Genomics pipelines: 500–1,000 GiB recommended. Reference genomes, FASTQ files, and alignment outputs can consume significant space.
- General production: Size according to your workload. Disk is roughly $0.073/GiB/month — typically a small fraction of the compute bill.
Backups
Section titled “Backups”Carolina Cloud does not currently offer automated backups or snapshots. For critical data, we recommend:
- Pushing results to S3-compatible storage (see S3 Integration)
- Using version control for code
- Periodically archiving important files off-instance