I would like to use a SSD persistent disk as a boot disk for a google cloud datalab instance. With the datalab create command it is not possible to choose a disk type. Is there any other way?
You are correct that it's not exposed as an option.
If you want to do this quickly you could create your own version of the create command, which is on github: https://github.com/googledatalab/datalab/blob/master/tools/cli/commands/create.py#L685
Otherwise I've created https://github.com/googledatalab/datalab/issues/1847 to track this.