In order to add storage disks of any variety to your SoftNAS VM, you will need to create at least one storage account. In order to leverage more than the 500 TB per storage account limit, you will need to create several blob storage accounts. When creating your multiple blob storage accounts, you must then decide whether to leverage hot or cold storage. You cannot mix hot and cold storage within a pool, but you can provide more than one pool. In other words, you will need to know what configuration you intend to create, and plan your storage accounts accordingly. One SoftNAS on Azure instance can potentially require many storage accounts.

To add a storage account:

Log into the Azure Portal.
Select Storage Accounts. Click Add.
Provide a name for the storage account, select the deployment model, and determine what type of account you wish to create, General Purpose, or Blob storage. For your Essentials instance, a Blob Storage account will be created.
For Replication, select Locally-redundant storage.
Finally, if you have more than one subscription, select the correct one. Determine whether to create a new resource group, or add the new account to an existing group. If using an existing group, select from the dropdown, and location will be auto-populated. If creating a new resource group, type the name and select the location. Click Create when your selections have been made.

You now have a new Blob storage account.

For more information on storage for Microsoft Azure, see the following links:

Hot or Cool Blob Storage

Adding Disks via the Microsoft Azure Portal

Adding Object Storage via the SoftNAS UI

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