Anyone willing to crack open their external drive to see if 4Kn?

[taltamir]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

4K native (4K logical sector size): Most of the drives larger than 2 terabytes and with a USB connection are this kind of drive.

This MS KB article claims that most external USB drives with over 2TB of space are 4Kn.
It was my understanding that currently ALL drives on the market are 512e and that USB external drives are identical to internal drives only placed in an a case.

Can someone confirm or refute the above by cracking open their USB external drive to confirm or refute it (it has to be one branded by a drive manufacturer like seagate or WD else it will just be an enclosure with an internal drive inside it)

 

[C1]

I would imagine that external USB with a manufacturing date of 2012 are 4K sector. (You'd have to probably open the enclosure to verify the drive's designator.)

Anyways, why do you care as these drives come pre-formatted?

 

[mv2devnull]

@C1: You did miss the point.

This MS KB article claims that most external USB drives with over 2TB of space are 4Kn.

Same table row claims that no Windows version supports them. Either that refers to the use of 4Kn internally (implying that USB gets around all the software issues) or there would not be many buyers.

Either way, where is my grain of salt?

 

[Zargon]

you cant use them for windows backup features (4k drives), they will randomly or always fail

 

[Mark R]

XP does not support hard drives larger than 2TB - due to the OS supporting a maximum of 4 billion sectors.

There is a work around for larger drives on XP, which is to use 4Kn drives. These appear to the OS as having 4k sectors - with the OS limit of 4 billion sectors, this allows up to 16 TB drives to be used on win XP.

For this reason, most USB drives larger than 2 TB appear to the OS as 4Kn.

This is potentially troublesome, as although windows XP and later can access 4Kn drives, they do not fully support them. In particular, certain OS components, like backup, VM hypervisors, etc. can malfunction with 4Kn drives.

In practice, if you open up a 3TB USB drive, what you find is a standard desktop 3TB drive - in other words, the drive is 4K internally, but emulates 512b sectors. The USB controller than re-emulated 4K native.

Incredibly, this works. Unsurprisingly, it's not fantastic.

 

[taltamir]

Supposedly ZFS supports 4Kn... 512e (4K internally drives emulating 512 sectors) have several different alignment issues that each reduce performance, performance can be improved on such drives by emulating 4Kn on them (so its 4K Emulation on 512 emulation on 4K actual) which can be done in linux or BSD for either ZFS or even ext3 (I think it was ext3).
Tools like GEOM enable this...

However such emulation on top of emulation is undesirable, it introduces bugs and performance loss and it is better to just use drives natively.

So if it is true that 4Kn drives are used inside USB enclosures then I wouldn't at all mind buy a couple, cracking them open, and looting the drives for use as internal drives on a FreeBSD based ZFS array... Or even if not, it would be a good sign that 4Kn drives are coming soonish, as last I checked there wasn't a single 4Kn drive in existence.