# Azure Linux VM Notes

###### tags: `azure`

## A note about disk speed on the Linux VMs

In my experiments last night, I found that the disks on the Linux VM are about five time slower than on my laptop when reading. It took about 7 hours to extract all the exif metadata from the plankton images and write it to a CSV file. Also some operations like "du" are extraordinarily slow and give inconsistent results.

The Azure image is a Standard_D16_v3

curl -s -H Metadata:true "http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2017-08-01"

which should mean that we have 16 CPUs and 64GB of memory.

## Response

/data is a network drive
/output is also a network drive
/shared is an NFS network drive (which should be slightly faster than the previous two)
/scratch is a 1TB local drive (not SSD) which is therefore different between different VMs in your research environment
/mnt is ephemeral storage that we do not recommend using