Dell PowerEdge T430 - Manual (Page 9)

9 512e and 4Kn Disk Formats
4.3 Mixing drives
If you decide to use a mix of drive types, but do not resolve these issues, the overall storage performance
may be lower than expected. To mix drives, you must have a good understanding of the operating system,
applications, and the configuration such as RAID, volumes, and so on. To ensure compatible drive mix,
check with your Dell team.
5 Preparing for and managing the 4K transition
Now that you understand the benefits of migrating to 4K sectors, as well as the potential impacts to
performance, let's look at ways to manage this transition through the context of applications and
operating systems.
5.1 Managing 4K sectors in the Windows environment
The single most important aspect of managing the transition to 4K sectors is related to the 512-byte
emulation drive alignment issues described in section 4. Advanced Format drives work well in an
Alignment 0 condition, where the physical to logical starting position are equal. Alignment conditions are
created when the hard drive partition(s) is created.
5.2 Enterprise Windows support for 4K sector media
Table 3 lists the Microsoft Windows support policy for various media and their resulting reported sector
sizes.
• Logical"sector:"The"unit"that"is"used"for"logical"blocks"addressing"for"the"media."We"can"also"think"
of"it"as"the"smallest"unit"of"write"that"the"storage"can"accept."
• Physical"sector:"The"unit"for"which"read"and"write"operations"to"the"device"are"completed"in"a"
single"operation."This"is"the"unit"of"atomic"write.
Table 3 Windows support
Drive formats
Reported logical
sector size Reported physical
sector size
Windows version with support
512-byte Native, 512n 512 bytes 512 bytes All Windows versions
Advanced Format, 512e,
AF, 512-byte Emulation 512 bytes 4096 bytes Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2008 R2 with MS
KB 982018
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2008 with MS KB
2553708
Advanced Format, AF, 4K
Native, 4Kn* 4096 bytes 4096 bytes Windows Server 2012 (4k data disks
are supported and as boot disks in
UEFI mode)
Note that Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 do not support 512e or 4Kn media. While
the system may boot up and operate minimally, there may be functionality issues, data loss, or sub-
optimal performance. Dell does not recommend using 512e media with Windows Server 2003.