Advanced Format and Native 4K

Looking answers for this for quite some time now:

  1. Are any of the current WD drives Native 4K?

  2. Can an AF drive with 512e work as native 4K under an OS that supports native 4K? (maybe designed with a possibility to disable 512e?)

  3. Does 512e emulation have any performance penalty compated to native 4K?

I have 2 1TB Velociraptors in RAID-0 under Windows 7 x64 SP1. The ONLY reason I see for moving to Windows 8 is the native 4K support. But if the drives are “locked” to this 512e emulation mode even if the OS supports native 4K, then I’ll stay with Windows 7 for now.

To the best of my knowledge:

  1. No

  2. Yes (no)

  3. Yes, but we don’t have any 4k native drives for comparison :slight_smile:

The thing is that there are still a lot of people not on Windows 8. If someone were to come out with a 4k native drive their market is solely Win 8 and Win Server 2003. So maybe in a couple of years when we have the majority on OS’s Win 8 or newer we’ll start seeing 4k native drives.

I hope so. But I’ve heard others saying that the answer for “2” is no and that the current line of 512e drives is doing the emulation no matter what.