Question: I just purchased a few new 3TB WD drives. These have physical 4k sectors, but there is some sort of layer which is providing 512B logical sectors (see the partition table below).
In order to attempt to get some more speed out of my hard drives, I would like to get rid of this logical layer and actually use the physical 4k sectors. However, I can’t figure out how to do this (or even if it’s possible) from the man pages of fdisk and parted, or from searching Google. Does anybody know how this could be done?
As to why this is relevant, this page demonstrates that meerly aligning the sectors properly can already make up to a 25% speed difference for reads, and more than 2500% for writes in some cases! Getting rid of the logical sectors in favor of the physicals ones should improve speeds even more. Thanks!
$ parted /dev/sdcGNU Parted 2.3Using /dev/sdcWelcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.(parted) printModel: ATA WDC WD30EZRX-00M (scsi)Disk /dev/sdc: 3001GBSector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096BPartition Table: gptNumber ?Start ?End ?Size ?File system ?Name ?Flags 1 ?1049kB ?3001GB ?3001GB ?zfs 9 ?3001GB ?3001GB ?8389kB
P.S. I don’t care about the data on the drives, I was just playing with different file systems. Also, this is my first time posting here, so please let me know if my posts should be formatted differently, etc.
Answer: According to an interview with a Western Digital representative published on http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=734 there is no option to disable 512e emulation on current Advanced Format drives.
[…] will Western Digital offer firmware upgrades that would convert current Advanced Format drives running in emulation mode, to the native format?
Unfortunately, no. Current Advanced Format drives cannot be converted to run in the native format through a firmware upgrade