HDD bytes per sector types; 512e vs 512n vs 4Kn?

I'm in the market for a replacement HDD; 4TB vs 2TB. I settled for Seagate Enterprise. The 3 models are the same price & same warranty $150 5yrs,

The types are
512e (emulated),
512n (native) and
4Kn 4096 native

I have many a few good articles on the differences sine this aspect never came up before, 20 years playing around with computers. I only looked at manufacture, capacity, interface, speed, & warranty.

I'm running Win7 Pro (still), I may go to W10, but that is a maybe. The drives I have currently are one SSD and two Hitachi 2TB with a 512 BPS spec. I looked up the specs and all that is provided is "512", not 512e or 512n. So I don't know what they are. The drives models numbers are identical except for the last digit; 0 vs 1;
Hitachi HUA723020ALA640

From what I have read, 521e is the way to go for current compatibility.But, that seems debatable according to the articles. This replacement will be a 'storage' drive and it seemed that a 4096 BPS would be the better choice.

Input please.

The Seagate Enterprise choices are;
ST4000NM0115
ST4000NM0085
ST4000NM0035

Why are you going with an enterprise drive in the first place? Get a regular drive.

I've honestly never heard of those options of bytes per sector. Is this an option on the enterprise drives?

I'm almost surprised there's still a choice, as I thought pretty much everything had moved to 4k sectors years ago as far back as the WinXP era. This was made as HD capacities increased, and bigger sectors help reduce the need to keep track of what goes where. At least Win7 and above is aware of sector alignment, so if you partition/format using that or newer, it will align the filesystem to the native HD structures. In case of a mismatch there may be some reduced performance for random operations.

Edit: read up a bit more on it myself, I might have got timing a bit out. Looks like it was introduced after Win7 launch. Still I'm pretty sure latest SP of Win7 will recognise it.

Edit 2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...t-policy-for-4k-sector-hard-drives-in-windows
Link above says all Windows versions support 512n, Win7/Vista with update or Win7 SP1 supports 512e, and Win8 or newer needed for 4Kn. I suspect the "4k" drives I'm thinking of were actually 512e with Windows still being smart enough to align the filesystem to the actual 4k physical sectors.

EarthDog said:

Why are you going with an enterprise drive in the first place? Get a regular drive.
I've honestly never heard of those options of bytes per sector. Is this an option on the enterprise drives?

Click to expand...

Cost & warranty. They are $20 less than WD's Black 4TB.
I never heard of those classifications either which is why I listed them in my OP. Seagate (and others) have good write ups on the subject;

https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/

videobruce said:

I'm in the market for a replacement HDD; 4TB vs 2TB. I settled for Seagate Enterprise. The 3 models are the same price & same warranty $150 5yrs,

The types are
512e (emulated),
512n (native) and
4Kn 4096 native

I have many a few good articles on the differences sine this aspect never came up before, 20 years playing around with computers. I only looked at manufacture, capacity, interface, speed, & warranty.

I'm running Win7 Pro (still), I may go to W10, but that is a maybe. The drives I have currently are one SSD and two Hitachi 2TB with a 512 BPS spec. I looked up the specs and all that is provided is "512", not 512e or 512n. So I don't know what they are. The drives models numbers are identical except for the last digit; 0 vs 1;
Hitachi HUA723020ALA640

From what I have read, 521e is the way to go for current compatibility.But, that seems debatable according to the articles. This replacement will be a 'storage' drive and it seemed that a 4096 BPS would be the better choice.

Input please.

Click to expand...

This is an interesting discussion and the Wikipedia article on Advanced formatting is a good read, especially with regards to motivation and implementation timelines.
To summarize:

• 512n is legacy and inefficient, both in terms of storage space and speed(?)
• 512e is actually a 4k native format. The drive controller firmware performs translation from 4k to 512 and vice versa. This is for sub-systems that still expect 512 sector boundaries.
• 4k native drives have no emulation layer on the drive. So no legacy support.

You might want to checkout this MS KB article:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...t-policy-for-4k-sector-hard-drives-in-windows

This is also a good read:
https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/

For your specific question, go with either 512e or 4kn.

Hope this helps.

I have eliminated the 512n.
512e seems the way to go, but since this will not be a O/S drive, it would appear 4Kn might be the better choice.