The following diagram illustrates the steps necessary for the storage device to complete the write:. As illustrated above, this process involves some work by the storage device that can result in a performance loss. To avoid this additional work, applications must be updated to do the following:. Resiliency speaks of the ability for an application to recover state between sessions. We have seen what is necessary for a e storage device to perform a byte sector write — the Read-Modify-Write cycle.
What would be the consequences? Because most hard disk drives update in place, the physical sector — that is, the portion of the media where the physical sector was located — could have been corrupted with incomplete information due to a partial overwrite. Put another way, you can think of it as potentially having lost all 8 logical sectors which the physical sector logically contains. While most applications with a data store are designed with the capability to recover from media errors, the loss of eight sectors, or put another way, the loss of eight commit records, can potentially make it impossible for the data store to recover gracefully.
An administrator may need to manually restore the database from a backup or may even need to perform a lengthy rebuild. One more important impact is that the act of another application causing a Read-Modify-Write cycle can potentially cause your data to be lost — even if your application is not running! With this in mind, it is important that application software reevaluate any assumptions taken in the code, and be aware of the logical-physical sector size distinction, along with some interesting customer scenarios discussed later in this article.
While some storage vendors may be introducing some levels of mitigation within certain e storage devices to try and help ease the performance and resiliency issues of the Read-Modify-Write cycle, there is only so much any mitigation can handle in terms of workload.
As such, applications should not rely on this mitigation as a long-term solution. The solution to this is not in-drive mitigation, but to have applications do the right set of things to avoid the Read-Modify-Write cycle.
This section discusses common scenarios where applications may have issues with large sector disks, and suggests an avenue of investigation to try and resolve each issue. This may cause all subsequent writes to become unaligned to physical sector boundaries. However, given the default partitioning in Windows XP, a 3rd party partitioning utility or incorrect usage of Windows APIs, created partitions may not be aligned to a physical sector boundary. Developers will need to ensure that the correct APIs are used to help ensure alignment.
The recommended APIs to help ensure partition alignment are outlined below. The best way to help ensure that alignment is correct is to do it right when initially creating the partition. Otherwise your application will need to take alignment into account when performing writes or at initialization — which can be a very complex matter.
As of Windows Vista SP1, this is generally not an issue; however, older versions of Windows can create unaligned partitions that can potentially lead to performance issues with some Advanced Format disks. The basic issue is that unbuffered writes are not aligned to the reported physical sector size of the storage media, which triggers a Read-Modify-Write in the drive that can result in performance issues. Buffered writes, on the other hand, are aligned to the page size — 4 KB — which coincidently is the physical sector size of the first generation of large sector media.
However, most applications with a data store perform unbuffered writes, and thus will need to ensure these writes are performed in units of the physical sector size.
Moreover, if you are currently aligning the writes to the sector size, this sector size is most likely just the logical sector size, as most existing APIs that query for the sector size of the media really just query the unit of addressing — that is, the logical sector size.
The sector size of interest here is the physical sector size, which is the real unit of atomicity. Some examples of APIs that retrieve the logical sector size are:. You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Thread starter ixion Start date Apr 19, Tags e 4kn.
Joined Dec 22, Messages They come formatted in e by default, but they support "Fast Format" to convert to 4Kn so that they appear as a true 4Kn to the OS. This is documented in the Seagate documentation, but they neglect to say how you do it, and with what tool.
What tool or command line option can I use to do this? Do you have to use the Seagate Seatools it doesn't even appear to support it? Does BSD or Windows support this? Or parted? I've search all over the web and cannot find any information on this.
Last edited: Apr 19, Yorick Dedicated Sage. Joined Nov 4, Messages 1, Yorick said:. Click to expand Jimi Evo Newbie. Joined Jun 8, Messages 3. First, I want to thank you, ixion. There is next to no documentation on the "How", just that it can be done. You sent me down the right path. But i'm having trouble with the last step. It won't set the sectors as you can see below. I'm banging my head against a wall.
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks in advance. Samuel Tai Never underestimate your own stupidity Moderator. Joined Apr 24, Messages 3, NugentS Neophyte Sage. Joined Apr 16, Messages Is this worth doing? Touro Desk - Technical Support or. Microsoft is not the source of support for this problem. Your first post gave the impression that "Advanced Format" and "4Kn or 4K Native" disk were and meant the same thing.
Microsoft stated since w7 was in extended support and EOL was , there no plans for making it compatible with 4Kn disk.. That could change though, if it hasn't already. All the drives in my Windows 7 system are " Advanced Format " and have been since they were readily available. IS WRONG , Advanced Format aka e, emulates or shows and K sized blocks to windows as do non advanced format disk because is a multiple of but, 4Kn disk only report size.
I didn't read every post in this thread. I immediately replied after reading your spouting off of wrong and misleading info, and then defending it so arrogantly.
So, if somebody has already brought your "lack of proper info" to your attention, then I digress. This list is from the the current info WD but the pdf is dated from July, Below is the list of the corresponding 2nd of the last 4 letters in the model name indexed as 4 in the pdf file. Do you ensure everything you eat has been certified as Kosher to avoid anything that might be spoiled or contaminated?
I know this is a elderly thread ; , but stumbled upon it in a search. Seagate however clearly states in their specs if a hdd is e, n or 4KN. My name is Aura. We do apologize for the inconvenience and the delay in our response. Based on the details provided, you are having questions about the RE internal drive and the WD community.
Regarding the RE unfortunately the Advanced Format 4KN is not compatible and regarding the WD community try to open it in another web browser or try to refresh the website. If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Client.
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Windows 7 Hardware Compatibility. Sign in to vote. Error code: 0xA The cause was given on a forum as: "The "root cause" is that Windows 7 and its system tools does not support a 4K native block size. Sunday, March 1, AM. YOu can determine if this is the case by looking in your event viewer logs Generally speaking you should not have to change sector size for anything.
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