4k native HDD - compatible ? or send back...

Fragment

n00b
Joined
Aug 5, 2017
Messages
4
Hello Community,

I hope there are some people who have experience with the 4K native HDD topic.

Recently I ordered two of these because of a good price I got at a webshop during a promotion:

http://www.seagate.com/enterprise-storage/hard-disk-drives/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/


I completely ignored the 512n / 512e / 4kn model differences and just went for the at that time cheapest/best available offer which was a 4kn drive.

Now the drives have been delivered today and I was telling a friend I would be extending my local storage a bit :)
Showed him a link to the drive and he said if I am sure that my PC is compatible with these.

Doing some research the software prerequisite for 4k native with Windows 10 or Linux 2.xxxx (dont remember exactly) are no problem from my end.

Now what I just can't seem to find are reliable sources that can tell me if the drive will be recognized by my Z97 MSI Gaming 5 mainboard ... if I plug it in normally as a SATA device.

I planned on running in RAID mode but it seems RAID with 4kn doesn't work:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/technologies/000005646.html


So now I am really curious and also anxious because can I plug this in and at least run these drives in AHCI mode with my board? I literally can't find anything about hardware prerequisites for a native 4K drive.
On the other hand my feeling says they should work at least in non-RAID mode... otherwise there would be plenty of people complaining of mis-purchasing these.

Any help appreciated because I don't wanna unseal a drive (2 drives) that just won't work at all.
Maybe there is someone who handled these drives before on here ?


Thanks in advance,
Fragment
 
forgot to add i dont need the ability to boot from it, if that changes anything... but in general full compatibility also as boot/system drive would be great ofc.

also i get the impression that at least a handful of people have no problem running these on linux as long as they do some special align command ?! at least to get the normal performance out of them... but this would mean either they have top end hardware, or the drives work on modern OS (win 10 / linux kernel 2.xx+) regardless of what model the SATA controller is.
 
Booting depends on the BIOS, but if not booting, it should work with anything. Never tried it though. Retail SATA drives are always 512e.

It's 512e drives that need special alignment, not 4kn.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top