Seagate SAS EXOS HDDs, 4kn or 512e reformatted ?

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JustinTeim

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Jun 25, 2019
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Seagate's website shows the EXOS 16TB SAS (12 Gbps) HDDs available as 512e/4kn format (ST16000NM002G) or as native 4kn format (ST16000NM007G). I would prefer the native 4kn, but it cannot be found on any of the US "where to buy" list, or on the German search engine heise.de/preisvergleich/.

So, two questions: (1) Does anyone here know (or know how to find out) if the EXOS 4kn HDDs are actually in existence, and where ?? ( Prior experience with writing to Seagate's customer service has elicited replies from someone who cannot read or write English.)

(2) Alternatively, Seagate's product brief says that the 512e drives can be re-formatted to 4kn, but I am not keen on experimenting. Has anyone here actually used the Seagate utility to reformat these drives ? (And if so, which OS and were there any problems?)

Thanks for any help !
 

hmw

Active Member
Apr 29, 2019
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Download SeaChest Utilities from seagate and read the docs or use SeaChest_Format to see what different block sizes your disk supports

SeaChest_Format -d PD0 --showSupportedFormats

SeaChest_Format explains --setSectorSize. IIRC, SATA drives don't support FastFormat so this is destructive
 

hmw

Active Member
Apr 29, 2019
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[1] What suppliers are you looking at? The 4kN drives are available from major suppliers like Provantage (PROVANTAGE: Seagate ST16000NM007G Seagate Hard Drive ST16000NM007G 16TB SAS 3.5 Bare). Most of the time it's a special order, meaning they will take longer to fulfill. Most shops buy the 512e version and set the correct block size themselves

[2] Yes the Windows utility allowed me to convert the Seagate drive, I don't have the SAS version but SATA, hence it took longer and was destructive. The SAS version allows you to do the format non destructively and takes a few minutes

And search the forum for setting the correct block size - it's literally the first thread for this section and talks about people's experiences with changing block size under different OSes etc - https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/how-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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Has anyone here actually used the Seagate utility to reformat these drives ?
Yes, with the sata drive connected to a smartraid controller in hba mode.
(And if so, which OS and were there any problems?)
Windows Server 2019 and yes. I used seachest_lite 1.0.1 and checked first what sector sizes were supported. The tool showed that the drive supported 512 and 4096 byte sector sizes. After that I ran seachest_lite again with the setsectorszie command which finished successfully (according to the output in powershell).
Now the drive can't be initialized in Windows with diskpart or fdisk/gparted/hdparm in Ubuntu. It still shows up, but now seachest says that drive doesn't support setsectorsize...

I wrote a mail to seagate support, let's see what they will say :D