Do GKE nodes run on standard HDDs instead of SSDs?

Hi all, we were setting up our app on GKE Kubernetes and noticed disappointing performance compared to Digital Ocean’s managed Kubernetes. It turnes out Digital Ocean uses SSDs everywhere by default. So PVs and also the droplets underlying the node pools run on SSDs. With GKE everything seems to run on HDDs by default. Very disappointing, especially as GKE is already more expensive than Digital Ocean. It seems one can get PVs to use SSDs using a special storage class on GKE (for quite some extra cost). However I haven’t found a way to run a node pool itself on an SSD. Anyone knows if that is possible?

Ah, there is boot disk type, which can be set to SSD. Will try that.

Doesn’t seem to make a difference. And GKE performance is still way behind Digital Oceans’s. Odd.