Render Persistent Disks

Persistent disks are high-performance SSDs you attach to a Render service to preserve filesystem changes across deploys and restarts. Without a disk, services have an ephemeral filesystem—all local file changes are lost on every deploy.

When to Use

• Storing file uploads, CMS media, or user-generated content
• Running a self-managed database (MySQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse) on Render
• Deploying stateful infrastructure (Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mattermost)
• Understanding why scaling is blocked or zero-downtime deploys are disabled
• Restoring data from an automatic disk snapshot

For managed databases, prefer Render Postgres (render-postgres) or Key Value (render-keyvalue) over self-managed alternatives on disk.

Critical Constraints

These constraints affect architecture decisions. Understand them before attaching a disk: