4Kn Compatability

[jaydub123]

I'd like to buy two HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drives, Model #HUH721010ALN600. This model is a native 4K HDD where both the logical and physical sector size are 4,096b. System specs are:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z270
Boot Drive: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB with Windows 10.
Data Drive: Samsung 960 Pro 1TB
Archive Drive: HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drive
Backup Drive: HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drive
No RAID implementation

According to Samsung, the SSD's have a logical sector size of 512b and a physical sector size of 4,096b (aka AF 512e). Before I buy I'd like to know the following:
* Will the differing 512e and 4Kn formats on the drives potentially cause any compatibility or performance issues? The Windows install will be a fresh install.
* Do I need to be concerned about compatibility of the onboard SATA controller or AHCI driver? I understand that INTEL RST doesn't support 4Kn. Not contemplating RAID.
* In this setup, are there any advantages of going 4Kn (rather than 512e) on the HSGT drives? Perhaps faster throughput on the HDD's?
* In this setup, are there any disadvantages of going 4Kn (rather than 512e) on the HSGT drives?
* Are there any other potential issues I need to be aware of to avoid a nasty surprise?

Many thanks for your guidance.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'd like to buy two HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drives, Model #HUH721010ALN600. This model is a native 4K HDD where both the logical and physical sector size are 4,096b. System specs are:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z270
Boot Drive: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB with Windows 10.
Data Drive: Samsung 960 Pro 1TB
Archive Drive: HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drive
Backup Drive: HGST HE10 10TB 4Kn drive
No RAID implementation

According to Samsung, the SSD's have a logical sector size of 512b and a physical sector size of 4,096b (aka AF 512e). Before I buy I'd like to know the following:
* Will the differing 512e and 4Kn formats on the drives potentially cause any compatibility or performance issues? The Windows install will be a fresh install.
* Do I need to be concerned about compatibility of the onboard SATA controller or AHCI driver? I understand that INTEL RST doesn't support 4Kn. Not contemplating RAID.
* In this setup, are there any advantages of going 4Kn (rather than 512e) on the HSGT drives? Perhaps faster throughput on the HDD's?
* In this setup, are there any disadvantages of going 4Kn (rather than 512e) on the HSGT drives?
* Are there any other potential issues I need to be aware of to avoid a nasty surprise?

Many thanks for your guidance.

OK, I may be able to answer this. Someone could tell me I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure having looked at the HGST spec that you'd only need assure that the drives are Advanced Format models. AF was an early issue with Windows 7, but there was an update that made it all work properly. Those drives work as 512e or 4kn, so I don't see what the problem would be.

I'm puzzled as to why your 850 Pro is the boot drive and a data drive is the 960 Pro. Did you add M.2/NVMe after the fact of building the system? I did the same thing, using an inexpensive ADATA SP550 as "temporary" dual-boot OS-system disk. The 480GB model. I have a 960 EVO 250GB strictly for caching the SATA drives -- 100GB per OS volume.

I was planning to move up to a 960 EVO or Pro, clone the ADATA to it, adjust the logical volumes and create caching volumes for SATA SSDs and HDDs. Those will be of modest number, because I have a server WHS/2008-R2 and most of the things I do these days are fairly casual or personal and property business. So I have a boot-system SSD, a Barracuda 2TB spinner to extend the storage of the SSD (programs, and assorted but limited categories), and I have a 1TB 2.5" spinner which is a media drive. Ordinarily, the 2TB would be the media drive, but it's split between the OSes while the 1TB is shared -- with no caching or only RAM-caching with the save-on-Shutdown/Restart feature under both OSes turned off.

So-o-o-o . . . Jaydub123 -- what do intended to store on these 10TB monsters, or how much of that space do you plan to occupy?

 

[jaydub123]

OK, I may be able to answer this. Someone could tell me I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure having looked at the HGST spec that you'd only need assure that the drives are Advanced Format models. AF was an early issue with Windows 7, but there was an update that made it all work properly. Those drives work as 512e or 4kn, so I don't see what the problem would be.

I'm puzzled as to why your 850 Pro is the boot drive and a data drive is the 960 Pro. Did you add M.2/NVMe after the fact of building the system? I did the same thing, using an inexpensive ADATA SP550 as "temporary" dual-boot OS-system disk. The 480GB model. I have a 960 EVO 250GB strictly for caching the SATA drives -- 100GB per OS volume.

I was planning to move up to a 960 EVO or Pro, clone the ADATA to it, adjust the logical volumes and create caching volumes for SATA SSDs and HDDs. Those will be of modest number, because I have a server WHS/2008-R2 and most of the things I do these days are fairly casual or personal and property business. So I have a boot-system SSD, a Barracuda 2TB spinner to extend the storage of the SSD (programs, and assorted but limited categories), and I have a 1TB 2.5" spinner which is a media drive. Ordinarily, the 2TB would be the media drive, but it's split between the OSes while the 1TB is shared -- with no caching or only RAM-caching with the save-on-Shutdown/Restart feature under both OSes turned off.

So-o-o-o . . . Jaydub123 -- what do intended to store on these 10TB monsters, or how much of that space do you plan to occupy?

Yes, they are monster's aren't they. He, he, he. The reason for the Samsung 960 is because it will also double as my video editing drive. I could spread out the Adobe Premiere folders over four HDD's but the Adobe forum suggests a single 960 has sufficient bandwidth so that you can place ALL of the folders (Projects, Media, Cache, Previews, Export) on just that drive. So, that seems like a more elegant solution. You need x4 PCIe bandwidth to do this. Given that most of the OS and video editing program files are already loaded in RAM, having a super bandwidth boot drive doesn't really get you much. Especially since OS and program files are comparatively tiny. All of the high bandwidth action is taking place on the 960.

So, do you think that the 4Kn drives would have higher performance since they don't need to do the Read/Modify/Write cycle? Or would having the 512e in the system complicate things.

Also, I was wondering that if the SSD's are dealing with 512b chucks of data, when they are writing to sectors on the HDD that are exposing themselves as 4K, will only 512b of data be written to each 4K sector on the HDD's? Horrible waste of space if that is the case.

As far as what to put on the 10TB HDD's, time will take care of that I'm sure. I've got lots of HD video rips and if I ever get around to 4K video, those TB's will be gobbled up fairly quickly I suspect. I'm planning this build will be my last (famous last words I'm sure).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Yes, they are monster's aren't they. He, he, he. The reason for the Samsung 960 is because it will also double as my video editing drive. I could spread out the Adobe Premiere folders over four HDD's but the Adobe forum suggests a single 960 has sufficient bandwidth so that you can place ALL of the folders (Projects, Media, Cache, Previews, Export) on just that drive. So, that seems like a more elegant solution. You need x4 PCIe bandwidth to do this. Given that most of the OS and video editing program files are already loaded in RAM, having a super bandwidth boot drive doesn't really get you much. Especially since OS and program files are comparatively tiny. All of the high bandwidth action is taking place on the 960.

So, do you think that the 4Kn drives would have higher performance since they don't need to do the Read/Modify/Write cycle? Or would having the 512e in the system complicate things.

Also, I was wondering that if the SSD's are dealing with 512b chucks of data, when they are writing to sectors on the HDD that are exposing themselves as 4K, will only 512b of data be written to each 4K sector on the HDD's? Horrible waste of space if that is the case.

As far as what to put on the 10TB HDD's, time will take care of that I'm sure. I've got lots of HD video rips and if I ever get around to 4K video, those TB's will be gobbled up fairly quickly I suspect. I'm planning this build will be my last (famous last words I'm sure).

I don't think that's the way the emulation works -- and again -- some can correct me. They're spinners! Just partition and format them at default, following any other directions in the guide and instructions.

I dabbled with video editing over a time between 6 and 8 years ago. And with the hardware at that time, there were occasions in which it gummed up performance.

I don't know what RAM caching or disk caching would buy you for that, because depending on the size of the large video files, you wouldn't want them in a persistent cache, so you'd need ample RAM to cache them there. By caching, I don't me "RAM disk."

However, if you were working with a single video file at a time, and you had a RAM disk where you could actually copy it temporarily, it would speed up working with the programs. But you'd have to clear the RAM disk after saving the file to the spinner(s) and load up a second one to work with it.

And maybe that's what you intend to do, if the 850 is a boot disk. If you're simply going to copy vid files up from HDD to NVMe, you need the high-capacity volume of the HDD storage, you're only slowed down by the HDD read speed.

 

[jaydub123]

Well, I wouldn't be able to use Intel Rapid Storage driver with the 4Kn drives as they are not supported. I'm not going to use RAID, but I will be AHCI. Will performance be sub-optimal without RST driver?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, I wouldn't be able to use Intel Rapid Storage driver with the 4Kn drives as they are not supported. I'm not going to use RAID, but I will be AHCI. Will performance be sub-optimal without RST driver?

Interesting. OK. Try and use the native MS AHCI driver. It was but a few years ago that it was a fallback for people upset about the bloatware of Intel, or a need for a driver supplementing the AHCI features of a RAID controller card.

I used it for a long time, and would continue but for the fact that the new Intel drivers seem to work fine in my machine, and I don't have your imperatives. If I did, that's the very next thing I would do.

Make sure you set up the system in AHCI-mode, or use the Windows "Fix It" tool to proceed through that otherwise easy conversion and a reboot or two. The Windows native driver should put entries into the IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers node of Device manager -- one for the controller, and one entry each for all the ports provided.

The Intel driver, as with other parallel setups, would install itself under Storage Controllers.

I'm rather puzzled at the HE10 issue, but I can file it away for further reference in my lame brain.

 

[jaydub123]

Thanks for the info. Samsung says their 850 and 960 SSD's have a logical sector size or 512b and a physical sector size of 4,096b. Win 10 Anniversary Edition 1607 supports 4Kn drives (logical and physical sector size are both 4,096b). If I install that O/S on a Samsung 850 or 960, will that set the logical sector size to 4,096b? If not (i.e. it remains at 512b), can the logical sector size be changed to 4,096b?

 

[mv2devnull]

A drive has sector size(s). The OS accesses logical sectors. If the drive says that one sector is 512b, then the OS writes 512b per sector.

If the OS tells the drive to write one 512b logical sector and the drive has 4K physical sectors, then the drive first reads that underlying physical sector, modifies the appropriate 512b part of that 4K in RAM, and writes the 4K back to the disk.

The thing is that OS hardly ever handles single logical sectors. Many filesystems use 4K blocks. One filesystem write operation thus writes 4K block, which means writing to eight 512b logical sectors. If the filesystem blocks align with physical sectors of the media, then one written block converts into one written physical sector. Current OS's align correctly by default.

An OS that supports 4K logical sectors, can convert a write of one 4K filesystem block into a write of one 4K logical sector, which the disk converts into one physical sector write. However, if the disk presents 512b logical sectors to the OS, then the OS has to use 512b logical sectors.

 

[jaydub123]

Which means that even if you have an O/S that can write to logical 4K (Win10), it will write 512b if that is how the drive is configured. Since the Samsung SSD's are logical 512b, the O/S would write 512b to those drives. So in my system, you would have the small data drive and boot drive (Samsung 850 and 960 respectively) being written to in 512b logical sectors, and the large data drive and backup drive (Hitachi 4Kn HDD's) being written to in 4K logical sectors. This would work. I'm just not sure if there is a compelling reason to introduce 4Kn into this situation. My original thinking is was that 4Kn drives might be much quicker since they don't have to do read-modify-write cycles. But maybe that extra activity doesn't have a meaningful effect on throughput.

 

[deustroop]

4k sectors have been available for over a decade . As pointed out, most drives use the 4K sector size with 512 byte emulation. Some drives do not use the emulation however and the HST drives appear to be that kind. Windows and modern partition schemes can read/write to 4k natively so, to my knowledge, no issues have arisen mixing up one with the other in a system except for cloning operations. Macrium Reflect in particular has never been able to clone a 512 emulated to a 4k non emulated drive.
Otherwise, knock yourself out.

 

[Adam Danischewski]

Thanks for the info. Samsung says their 850 and 960 SSD's have a logical sector size or 512b and a physical sector size of 4,096b. Win 10 Anniversary Edition 1607 supports 4Kn drives (logical and physical sector size are both 4,096b). If I install that O/S on a Samsung 850 or 960, will that set the logical sector size to 4,096b? If not (i.e. it remains at 512b), can the logical sector size be changed to 4,096b?

I'm not sure where you got that on Samsung but the 850 Pro is not 4k native. The 860 Pro is 4k native, I'm not sure about the 960 (it probably is).

On Linux to check your your physical block size:
paste <(ls -1 /sys/block/*/queue/physical_block_size) <(cat /sys/block/*/queue/physical_block_size)

Tools may report otherwise. On Linux, you can try, as root: fdisk -l /dev/sdX, hdparm -I /dev/sdX, smartctl -a /dev/sdX, parted -l /dev/sdX

 

[Tyler4415]

Were they 4KN(ative) drives though? Most of the 4K drives still come as 512e(mulated) to remain backward-compatible.







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