Western Digital 16TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drive - WD161KRYZ ($299.99) (Honey 12% cashback + PayPal 12% cashback available!)

Anyone know how long it takes for PP cash to "go through" or be usable?
 
I bought another one last night and my Honey is only reflecting $13 pending... Hmm.
 
Gone from WD direct but still available for $340 ship/sold by Amazon.
 
Nice to see the drive price wars alive an well in the enterprise realm. :) Both manufacturers drives are top notch. (y)
 
Actually, any 512e drive is 4kn since the 512 bytes is emulated and the 4k bytes is native. Most drives today ship as 512e as there are specific part numbers for the 4kn drives although some of the sas drives can have their sector translation turned off to be expose the native 4k sectors. Ironically, you can also do this with some easystore external drives using a specific WD utility. I actually have 2x of my 14TB easystores as 4k so I can make a huge MBR partition to use with xp. (y)
I guess I don't 100% understand all of this. I understand that's how much information per block, but I don't know how/why it affects compatibility so much.

I saw a post on FB marketplace where someone was selling drives that were 520 byte sectors, and they wouldn't work for their application. Said he didn't want to go through the effort to format them 512.
 
I guess I don't 100% understand all of this. I understand that's how much information per block, but I don't know how/why it affects compatibility so much.

I saw a post on FB marketplace where someone was selling drives that were 520 byte sectors, and they wouldn't work for their application. Said he didn't want to go through the effort to format them 512.
So it's just multiplication essentially. The size of a drive is determined by the number of sectors and the size of each sector. 4k sectors and just 1 sector would be 4096 bytes of data. A 512 sector x1 sector is just 512 bytes. 4x 512 sectors is 4096 bytes, but is 4 sectors. The 520 sector is a bit of an exotic one found on drives used in storage arrays. It stores and additional bit of crc information in the extra 8 bytes that these storage systems can use to validate data on a sector by sector basis. Many times these drives can be formatted to 512 for use outside the storage arrays, but as the fb post mentioned, some don't know how to do that or are too lazy to do so.

So what does all this mean? Nothing really unless you're doing something where the sector size matters such as a boot drive in win7+ or a large drive on a 32-bit os. In the case of the former, there are some special steps to boot a 4k drive on win7+, on the latter, if you switch to 4k sectors, you can exceed the 2TB drive/partition size limit since that limit was based on the number of sectors, not sector size.

Confusing as mud? You're welcome! (y):D
 
And throw in that some 520 can't be formatted into 512 lol

(Edited for spelling)
 
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I guess I don't 100% understand all of this. I understand that's how much information per block, but I don't know how/why it affects compatibility so much.

I saw a post on FB marketplace where someone was selling drives that were 520 byte sectors, and they wouldn't work for their application. Said he didn't want to go through the effort to format them 512.
Depending on the size of the drive and the controller involved, it can take many, many hours to use something like sgformat to change a drive from 520 to 512 format, assuming the particular drive allows it. I seem to recall there were some enterprise SSDs that couldn't be reformated.

As far as the 4kn issue, that comes down to the controller and OS. For me, my OSs all would support it, but the PERC H710's in my servers do not support drives that present as 4k sector size, so I have to find 512 or 512e drives. For my H710 controller, it's specifically a firmware level issue where the drive is detected but marked as unsupported. People crossflashing a H710 to IT mode report being able to use 4kn drives with it. I suspect the generic HBA/IT firmware being used for the process is more up to date than Dell's last posted version for 12th gen server hardware.
 
Depending on the size of the drive and the controller involved, it can take many, many hours to use something like sgformat to change a drive from 520 to 512 format, assuming the particular drive allows it. I seem to recall there were some enterprise SSDs that couldn't be reformated.

As far as the 4kn issue, that comes down to the controller and OS. For me, my OSs all would support it, but the PERC H710's in my servers do not support drives that present as 4k sector size, so I have to find 512 or 512e drives. For my H710 controller, it's specifically a firmware level issue where the drive is detected but marked as unsupported. People crossflashing a H710 to IT mode report being able to use 4kn drives with it. I suspect the generic HBA/IT firmware being used for the process is more up to date than Dell's last posted version for 12th gen server hardware.
So long explanation short... Stick with 512/512e(4kn) drives for best compatibility?
 
So long explanation short... Stick with 512/512e(4kn) drives for best compatibility?
Yep! Unless you have a reason to be using 4k natively, there's really no reason to as most hardware and software is used to 512 sectors, emulated or native. (y)
 
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