Vercel Launches Public Beta of 'Drives', Persistent Storage for Sandboxes

Vercel has launched Drives, a persistent storage feature available for use in Sandbox environments, in public beta. Drives mount as directories that are not tied to a specific Sandbox instance, allowing data to be reused across runs or between different Sandbox instances.

Key Features and Use Cases

Drives are useful for preserving AI agent workspaces or disk memory, as well as for reusing datasets, models, and dependency trees. By creating or importing Drives and mounting them to a specific path when starting a Sandbox, data saved to that path persists even after the Sandbox terminates.

Data sharing works as follows:

• Write mode: Only one Sandbox can mount as read-write at a time.
• Read mode: After write operations are complete, multiple Sandboxes can simultaneously mount read-only snapshots of a specific point in time to read data. Subsequent write operations are not reflected in existing snapshots, so a new snapshot must be mounted to view the latest data.

Limitations and Pricing

Each Sandbox can mount up to 4 Drives to different paths. The default maximum capacity is 1 TiB (1 GiB for the Hobby plan), and can be configured up to 16 TiB upon request. Drives are pinned to the region where they are created, and Sandboxes mounting them must also run in that region.

Pricing is based on storage capacity, read, and write usage. For the iad1 region, storage is $0.05 per GB-month, reads are $0.0015 per GB, and writes are $0.004 per GB. Hobby plan users receive 15 GB of storage and 30 GB each of read/write capacity for free per month.