Managed Disks were covered in Chapter 1, Working with Azure Virtual Machines, and they handle the storage account creation for you. With Unmanaged Disks, which are the traditional disks used for VMs, you needed to create a storage account manually and then select that storage account when you created the VM. With Managed Disks, this burden is handled for you by Azure. You select the disk type and the performance tier (Standard or Premium), and the managed disk is created. It also handles scaling automatically for you.
Managed Disks are recommended by Microsoft over Unmanaged Disks.
