SamirD

If a drive is 512n, then it could not be changed to 4kn because the native sectors are 512k. But it seems that the WD easystore drives do have the capability to change from 512e to 4kn, but not at the controller level as my HGST drive should have worked if that was the case. I believe these easystore drives have the ability to change to 4kn and run 4kn. I know I've read some online experiences of people running these 4kn in raid systems after they were shucked from the enclosures. The usb enclosures can also provide translation and I remember those coming out around the same time the 3TB drives came out. Most drives today, even super large ones like my 16TB Exos are still 512e. Most every drive I have--8, 10, 12, 16TB--are all 512e. The 4kn versions of these are usually special order from what I've found.

Most drives today that are 3TB+ are 4kn, ie 4k native sectors. And then most are 512e, ie 512k emulated sectors for compatibility. (You can still get 512k sectored drives, but they're usually special order. There's also 528k, 520k and some other formats of sectors used in enterprise storage. In the same vein, you can also buy 4kn drives that fully report 4k sectors with no emulation, again usually special order.) Most sas drives can be formatted to any sector size very easily using I think it is sg_util in linux (may be something different as I haven't done it myself). And generally this is will work with sas drives that don't otherwise have a lock on changing the sector size. From my reading and some experience, most sata drives cannot change their sector sizes like their sas counterparts--even on the sata versions of sas drives. I believe the sector changing capability is an artificial limit imposed by manufacturers to make sure sata drives don't replace their more expensive sas counterparts in enterprise storage (as it could save companies literally hundreds of thousands of dollars), but that the best buy easystore drives are a bit of an exception wherein they can be changed to a 4k native mode. I thought it was just the enclosure that was able to do this, so I tried an HGST 10TB drive that I know is 4kn in it and the WD utility did not allow me to change the sector size. From my research, the My Book series of enclosures uses a encryption which causes a drive that is removed from an enclosure to appear as nothing/raw data when connected directly since the encryption is missing. This isn't a problem if you're just shucking the drive from the enclosure or using the drive exclusively in the enclosure, but becomes a problem when a drive with data is moved in or out of the enclosure. The same limitation doesn't exist on the easystore enclosure so that's why you find them for sale on ebay as they are a fine external enclosure for any drive, and can change certain select drives (who knows which ones?) from 512e to 4kn.

I have run into a similar issue when I tried an HGST enterprise drive in an easystore enclosure that I know worked for easystore drives. I think the root cause of the issue is that generally sata drives cannot change their sector size from 512e to 4kn (unlike sas which can), and the easystore, et al externals must have drives that have this capability enabled. If you want to try manually, you can boot up a live cd of parted magic and there are linux commands to change the sector size (don't know them off the top of my head, just saw them on the servethehome forum).

Sorry, I should have specified. This is for someone that wants to keep using FAT32 for compatibility. :)

This is what I did to use my 10TB WD drives with xp. I then went to windows 7 to partition the drive into 5x MBR 2TB partitions, let it format them to NTFS, and then used the ridgecorp fat32format (found here: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm) to reformat the NTFS partitions to FAT32. While it takes time to mount all the partitions--it works on xp and higher as well as most nas units I have tried it with, and should work well with macs as well. It is unfortunate that I have not found a way to format any other sata drives to 4kn sectors as I could then use enterprise class drives with xp in the same manner. 4kn drives in xp pretty much allow you to break the 2TB drive size limit, although you are limited to 2TB partitions. But I dealt with this before when I had 9GB cheetah drives on my windows 3.1 system and had partition limits of 2GB--some story, different decade, lol.

Amazing to see that dos can handle 32k sectors! That paves the way for a lot of future compatibility. So with vfat, would the caching be the only thing lost? If so, then would disabling caching allow for an easy patch for sectors >4k?

Ah, gotcha. And that makes sense. Such a requirement would only be if one needed it, ie commercial use. It's amazing how much very expensive equipment still uses good old reliable dos to do the job.

Pretty unreal that DOS can access a larger partition size than 9x. Wait, but isn't 9x still based on DOS? I remember I would always take the command.com from 9x and use it under win3.1. So then what version of DOS is the patched DOS that works?

Such great new information! Thank you for all the research!

Yeah, the documentation here on the WD formatter is much more detailed than WD's docs on it. I wish I would have found this earlier as I was curious if I had to 'install' the software or not. Wow, I didn't know you could even have larger sector sizes than 4k. I guess these would be emulated then so 8Ke, 16Ke, etc. It would be interesting to see what these would do, but I wouldn't want to mess with them unless you could somehow reverse the process. Perhaps some linux commands? I know the guys on servethehome (enterprise computing forum) know ways to format 520k and 528k drives to standard 512k, so I'm thinking the same tools could be used for resetting a drive back to 512/4k from whatever it gets set to.

I know it's a bit of a bump and I wish I found this thread earlier, but I wanted to confirm that the WD Formatter still works today. I used it on 2x 10TB Bestbuy WD Easystore drives and was able to create 5x fat32 partitions on each drive that work both under xp and win7. I learned something too as I was not aware that the formatter will allow changing the drive back to 512e in win7.

I registered just to say a big THANK YOU to this thread. I have 2 of the 10TB Best Buy cheap externals that have been selling multiple times this year both formatted MBR with 5x FAT32 partitions on each. NTFS always messes up the original dates of files depending on the system time so I only use FAT32 when original dates are important. And thanks to this thread, I was able to make them both work after some persistence. I bet they would even work in a 98se system with the right usb driver, but I haven't rebuilt mine yet.

I've been into computers for decades now and kept running into this site when searching for various things, so today when a link came up I registered. :D