Filestore — the service tiers, their protocols, their capacity ranges, and the legacy tiers to avoid
Managed NFS on Google Cloud. The current tiers and their capacity ranges, which support NFSv4.1 and which are NFSv3-only, which are zonal and which regional, and the absence the vendor page leaves about changing tier after creation.
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Filestore service tiers
1. The current tiers
| Tier | Capacity range | Protocols | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zonal | 1–9.75 TiB | NFSv3, NFSv4.1 | zonal |
| Zonal | 10–100 TiB | NFSv3, NFSv4.1 | zonal |
| Regional | 100 GiB–10,239 GiB | NFSv3, NFSv4.1 | regional |
| Regional | 10–100 TiB | NFSv3, NFSv4.1 | regional |
| Multishares for GKE (Enterprise) | 1–10 TiB | NFSv3, NFSv4.1 | regional |
Note that Zonal and Regional each appear twice, with different capacity bands. The band is part of the choice, not a detail: 9.75 TiB and 10 TiB are different products with the same tier name.
2. The legacy tiers
| Tier | Capacity range | Protocols | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic HDD | 1–63.9 TiB | NFSv3 only | zonal |
| Basic HDD on GKE | 100 GiB–63.9 TiB | NFSv3 only | zonal |
| Basic SSD | 2.5–63.9 TiB | NFSv3 only | zonal |
The protocol column is the reason to care. If the workload needs NFSv4.1 — for its locking semantics, or because the client only speaks it — the legacy tiers are out, and so is any plan that reached for Basic SSD because the capacity band looked convenient.
3. The capacity floors are a real constraint
The smallest current Zonal instance starts at 1 TiB and the smallest Regional at 100 GiB. There is no
small shared filesystem here. A workload that needs 20 GiB of shared state is paying for a terabyte, which is
usually the signal to use Cloud Storage (reference/storage/cloud-storage.md) or a database instead of a
filesystem.
For a migration estimate this is the row that changes a number: an on-premises estate of many small NFS exports does not map one-to-one onto Filestore instances at any sensible cost. Consolidate, or change the storage model.
4. An absence, recorded
The page gives no information about changing tier after instance creation. Do not assume it is possible. Plan the tier as a create-time decision and establish the change path from the product's own documentation if a design depends on it.
Next: guides/parity/storage.md compares this to Amazon EFS and Azure Files / Azure NetApp Files, where the
capacity floors and the protocol support differ in ways that matter.