-1

I am having a bit of hard time getting a solid answer from any HP documentation.

I have a bunch of old(er) HP 10k SAS drives I wanted to use. I wanted to align them to 4k sectors but I cannot determine if the drives actually support advanced format or not. I looked on the drives and I don't see the "AF" marking.

Does anyone know if my (2009 ish) HP drives will align to 4k sectors?

EDIT

A set of the drives all have; HP Model: EG0146FAWHU

Does this help?

3
  • 1
    How do you expect an answer when you don't provide the drive model numbers?
    – DavidPostill
    Mar 18, 2016 at 12:52
  • I don't the have the drives in front of me right now. Let me see if I can drill up some numbers. Mar 18, 2016 at 12:55
  • Try the HP tool...support.hp.com/th-en/document/c02856418
    – Moab
    Mar 18, 2016 at 23:21

1 Answer 1

0

You can align the partitions to 4096 bytes even if your drive has 512-byte physical sector. Actually, we often align partitions to 1MiB (1048576 bytes) these days.

The only situation you don't wanna do it is that your drive has a relatively rare physical sector size that the size you align to is not a multiple of it.

Technically partition alignment is only a concern when the logical sector size is smaller than the physical sector size (Hence, only "Advanced Format 512e" but not "Advanced Format 4Kn").

P.S. "Advanced Format" is not an indicator of whether a drive support a certain feature. It's merely a marketing description of certain physical characteristics (logical and physical sector size) of the drive.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .