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?)
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.
Yes, but we don’t have any 4k native drives for comparison
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.