4kn practical benefits (when no drawbacks?)

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sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2006
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I have an application where I can quick format a bunch of drives from 512e to 4kn and the target system would be happy with the latter. I suppose the major risk is (a) the time to do so and (b) the risk that I do something boneheaded and brick something, which I'm sure is totally possible :) What I haven't been able to understand is the practical benefit to consider vs. the risk. I can't find anything conclusive that says 512b emulation creates a performance or other overhead at the drive level that can be measured. I suppose there is a potential logical / file-system level IOPS benefit but I also have struggled to find convincing data on this as well. Hoping someone has either pointers or practical experience; it's been a while since I dived deep into storage and most of my experience pre-dates widespread availability of 4kn drives.
 
As long as the partitions are 4K aligned (which has been standard practice for a long time), there's no performance problem with 512e.

Some proprietary RAID systems might be picky about sector size - though mainly about consistency rather than a preference for one or the other.
 
I just recently ran into the issue that 4K sectors only support up to 16TB partitions. Had to go with 8K on a 20TB partition.
 
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