Are NVMe drives included in bare metal rentals?
In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), whether local NVMe drives are included in your bare metal rental depends entirely on the Shape Family you select. Unlike some providers where local storage is a standard "scratch" disk, OCI categorizes shapes by their storage architecture.
If your workload requires extreme disk speed (like large databases or Big Data analytics), you should choose Dense I/O shapes.
Included Storage: These come with locally attached NVMe SSDs physically installed in the server.
Performance: Because they are direct-attached, they offer the highest possible IOPS and the lowest latency (sub-millisecond) because data doesn't have to travel over the network.
Capacity Example: A BM.DenseIO.E4.128 includes 54.4 TB of raw NVMe storage as part of the rental.
Note: These drives are "ephemeral," meaning if you terminate the instance, the data is wiped. You must manage your own data redundancy (RAID) at the OS level.
Standard bare metal shapes (e.g., BM.Standard.E6 or BM.Standard3) do not include local NVMe drives.
Storage Architecture: These rely entirely on OCI Block Volumes (network-attached storage).
Benefit: Block volumes are more flexible; they are persistent (data stays if the server is deleted), can be backed up automatically, and can be resized on the fly.
Cost: You pay for the compute (cores/RAM) and the storage as separate line items on your bill.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) and GPU shapes often include local NVMe storage to act as "scratch space" for massive simulations or AI training checkpoints.
HPC Shapes: Almost always include at least one local NVMe drive (typically around 3.8 TB to 6.4 TB) at no extra charge to ensure the processor isn't throttled by network storage speeds.
GPU Shapes: Most bare metal GPU shapes (like those for H100 or A100) include several terabytes of local NVMe storage to handle the massive data throughput required for AI/ML workloads.
| Shape Type | Local NVMe Included? | Best Use Case |
| Standard | No (Uses Block Volumes) | Web apps, App servers, general workloads. |
| Dense I/O | Yes (Up to 50TB+) | Databases (Oracle, NoSQL), Hadoop, Spark. |
| HPC | Yes (Standard 3.8TB - 6.4TB) | Scientific modeling, CFD, Crash testing. |
| GPU | Yes (Varies by GPU model) | AI Training, Video rendering, LLMs. |
If you see "Dense" in the name of the shape, you are getting local NVMe drives. If you see "Standard," you are renting a "diskless" server that boots from a network volume.