Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?
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We're moving from using a Synology 1512 with consumer drives to local storage (am eyeing Seagate Enterprise hard drives) for one of our servers. I'm presented with whether or not I want to use hard drives with native 4K sectors.
I know my RAID controller supports it and Windows Server 2012 R2 supports it. I also know the existing drives (Intel s3500) are 512e, as
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfoshows the sector size as 512 bytes and the physical sector size as 4096 bytes. Also, the iSCSI drive that the Synology presents also shows the same sector sizes.Assuming my company's web application supports this 4k environment, would there be any reason to avoid the new 4kn drives?
Also always, thanks my fellow Mangolassi folk for aiding in my learning
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@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
Assuming my company's web application supports this 4k environment, would there be any reason to avoid the new 4kn drives?
The application doesn't have knowledge of the sector size. That doesn't apply.
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@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
I know my RAID controller supports it and Windows Server 2012 R2 supports it.
Windows shouldn't be installed directly on the RAID controller, you should have a hypervisor layer in between that will talk to the storage directly. Windows should only be seeing the VHD and not care what is underneath.
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@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
I know my RAID controller supports it and Windows Server 2012 R2 supports it. I also know the existing drives (Intel s3500) are 512e, as
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfoshows the sector size as 512 bytes and the physical sector size as 4096 bytes. Also, the iSCSI drive that the Synology presents also shows the same sector sizes.What that's telling me is that something, somewhere, in the hardware stack doesn't know how to talk 4k sector. So the system is talkig to the drive in 512 byte chunks, but the drive its self is using 4096 byte sectors. With the caching embedded into the drive electronics, this shouldn't effect performance anyhow. If you have a RAID controller with either no cache or the cache turned off then it will slow things down.
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From: https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/advanced-format-disk-compatibility-update
This topic introduces the effect of Advanced Format storage devices on software, discusses what apps can do to help support this type of media, and discusses the infrastructure that Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 to enable developers to support these types of devices.<
I must've misunderstand the usage of apps. Article was a good read.
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@scottalanmiller said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
I know my RAID controller supports it and Windows Server 2012 R2 supports it.
Windows shouldn't be installed directly on the RAID controller, you should have a hypervisor layer in between that will talk to the storage directly. Windows should only be seeing the VHD and not care what is underneath.
I know. The environment I'm in should be virtualized.
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@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
From: https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/advanced-format-disk-compatibility-update
This topic introduces the effect of Advanced Format storage devices on software, discusses what apps can do to help support this type of media, and discusses the infrastructure that Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 to enable developers to support these types of devices.<
I must've misunderstand the usage of apps. Article was a good read.
It's about performance. Not support.
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@scottalanmiller said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
@EddieJennings said in Purchasing new hard drives: Embrace 4kn?:
From: https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/advanced-format-disk-compatibility-update
This topic introduces the effect of Advanced Format storage devices on software, discusses what apps can do to help support this type of media, and discusses the infrastructure that Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 to enable developers to support these types of devices.<
I must've misunderstand the usage of apps. Article was a good read.
It's about performance. Not support.
Curious, because it read to me like it's a support issue, which can be worked around with the 512e drives with a possible performance cost. However, on second thought, it would make sense that if the OS supports 4kn sectors, then the applications running on top of it shouldn't care about the sectors (which is what you said before).
