Question Are these two format types compatible ?

[dan99t]

Hi,

My Dell Precision 5820 workstation came with following 4TB HDD

Toshiba 3.5" 4TB SATA Enterprise HDD Part No : MG08ADA400NY

with Format Type 512n

What is available in the market now is :


Toshiba 3.5" 4TB SATA Enterprise HDD Part No : MG08ADA400E

with Format Type 512e

The HDD with Format Type 512n does work in my 12 year old Legacy Dell Precision workstation 3500.

Will the HDD that is now available in the market with Format Type 512e

work in my 12 year old Legacy Dell Precision workstation 3500 too ?

Meaning are Format Type 512n & Format Type 512e compatible & would my Legacy Dell Precision workstation 3500 be able to format the new drive with Format type 512e & if yes what do I need to do when I try to Format it with Format Type 512e in Legacy workstation ?

Thank You.

 

[helpstar]

which operating system are you using?

why not getting 512n from a different company?

 

[fzabkar]

Any 512e drive should work. They are the most common HDDs. 512n are rare nowadays.

You don't need to do anything special when you format a 512e drive under a modern OS. Partitions will be automatically aligned to 4KB physical sector boundaries.

 

[dan99t]

Unfortunately it is not a modern OS. It is Windows-7 ( Ultimate ) and 512n drive is not available at all.

They are both 512 Bytes sectors & not 4KB physical sector.

Here is what Toshiba Website says :

https://storage.toshiba.com/enterprise-hdd/enterprise-capacity/mg08d-series

The one that I have is - 4 TB - SATA-3.3 - 512n - SIE - MG08ADA400NY

The one available in market is - 4 TB - SATA-3.3 - 512e - Standard - MG08ADA400E

 

[BFG-9000]

No, "512e" is truly 4k physical sectors but with 512b emulation. That is, it's a 4k sector drive but has firmware to report (lie?) to the OS that it's 512b when it's really not. Presumably it's smart enough to align the partitions correctly when Windows is used to format the drive. Sure, a 512e drive tends to be slower in writes than a 512n drive of the same capacity (and slower than 4kn for Windows 8 and newer) from the translation, but what are you going to do since you can't buy 512n anymore?

I can't see how this would be a problem if you are using NTFS on a HDD in Windows 7, since this is exactly what 512e was intended for, backwards compatibility of advanced format hard drives in older legacy Windows systems like XP. If you really want to be sure it's aligned properly, you could always partition the drive using newer Windows or Linux, or use Minitool Partition Wizard's Align Partition or Align All Partitions functions. This is the same thing you should do if using a SSD on a legacy OS, where the write penalty would be even greater from having to be block erased.

It's hilarious that even the current Windows 11 FAT formatter is unable to properly align a partition on anything but a 512b drive, although the NTFS and EXT formatters included in Windows work just fine. That is more an issue for USB flash drives though, given it is also artificially limited to 32GB for FAT32, but be aware the FAT formatter built into Windows will misalign any non-512b drive.