A general-purpose VM experiences excessive disk read throttling on a Zonal SSD Persistent Disk while reading large files. Disk size is 350 GB. To maximize throughput while minimizing cost, what should you do?

Local SSDs offer significantly higher IOPS and throughput compared to Zonal SSD Persistent Disks, making them ideal for workloads requiring maximum disk performance, like reading large files. Migrating to a Local SSD directly addresses the throttling issue by providing dedicated, high-performance storage attached to the instance, which is also cost-effective for this specific use case as you only pay for the instance and the attached local SSD. Increasing the durable disk size to 1 TB would increase throughput for Persistent Disks, but Local SSDs still offer superior performance and may be more cost-effective for the required performance level. Increasing the instance's CPU allocation would not directly resolve disk I/O bottlenecks. Migrating to a Regional SSD would improve redundancy but not necessarily throughput to the same extent as a Local SSD, and Local SSDs are generally more performant for single-instance high-throughput needs.