Drives without sector size emulation

[Gilbo]

I was wondering if anyone knew whether the Hitachi 7K3000 drives are emulating 512 byte sectors (and are native 4K), or are actually 512 byte sectors. I've seen conflicting reports in my research.

The website says 512 bytes, but that could easily be through emulation. On the other hand, over at HardOCP at least one poster claims they're native. Apparently, they're able to be native because the better ECC isn't needed since the 7K3000 is lower density, 5-platter 3TB design.


Alternately, does anyone know if they can be jumpered to disable the emulation, and/or if it's doing the single sector, 1st partition offset trick that some WD drives do (which means if try to align the partitions you actually unalign them). (P.S. Does anyone else feel this transition is turning into a clusterfuck?)



As far as what else is still available, I know that Hitachi 7K1000.C's are native 512 byte sector sizes.

I care because sometimes you can't align the partition (eg. for use with ZFS), and, consequently, you end up in trouble no matter how careful you are with the emulated drives.

 

[ddrueding]

I have about 8 of them here, what would you like me to check?

I'm about to go visit my grandmother, but I'll be back in about 18 hours.

 

[Gilbo]

Well, it's a bit of a pain to check if the manufacturer doesn't advertise it.


The only way I know of is to test random writes with a 4K aligned partition and then test again without. If the latter has lower performance, you know the drive was lying about where its sector boundaries are. There may be an easier way, but I don't know it if the drive insists on lying about it.

 

[Gilbo]

A poster on the HardOCP Forums thinks native 512-byte sectors are confirmed in the OEM specifications.

This may be one of the only recent, high-capacity drive series with native 512 byte sectors.

 

[Stereodude]

I would agree after reading the OEM specs.

 

[Gilbo]

Me too. If there was emulation going on, they would have noted it in there.

 

[Stereodude]

They are also a lot of uninformed people over there. :erm:

 

[Gilbo]

There are also a lot of uninformed people over there.

It's always that way though. You have to find the 5-10% who know what they're talking about, remember their names, and listen to them. I've noticed their displays forum is pretty shockingly anal for example. I couldn't trust most of those guys opinions because they're freaking out about things that would simply never bother me, but to each their own.


In fact, this is one of the only boards on the internet where, if nearly any given poster, opens their mouth, you can be pretty certain that they're giving you the right information. An unusual spot in that respect.

 

[Mercutio]

A dozen or more years ago, I remember reading discussions on Slashdot about very specific technical issues related computer engineering. Now I almost can't stand to even look at a thread there that relates to computer hardware. There are just too many morons on the internet.