Format WD60EFRX-68MYMN1 as 4K?

Hi,

How do I format these drives as 4K? I’d read somewhere that they’re 4K internally but emulate 512 byte sectors to increase compatibility. I think they’re listed as Advanced Format Drives on the WD site which I think means they’re 4K.

Is there any way to turn that off so they report as 4K native to my NAS?

Unless your NAS works with pre-formatted hard drives then it may turn out to be difficult. On Windows, you only need to change the allocation unit size to 4096 when formatting in order to ensure 4K, but your disk drive may lose the configuration if your NAS formats it again.

unless you have a very old NAS drive will work using 4k sectors as expected

I have a very new NAS and was surprised it came up as “4K Native - No”.

Hmm. I shall go asking the Synology people the same question.

Thank you.

No, that’s not possible. The “Advanced Format”-lable means, that the hard drive have a physical sector size lager than 512 Bytes. That’s all. At the moment, the phyiscal sector size of an Advanced Format drive is 4096 bytes. All Advanced Format hard drives have currently a 512-byte sector emulation (called AF-512e, that’s the logical sector size), with the exception of a few enterprise hard drives. Only these enterprise drives currently have no emulation and are so-called AF-4Kn drives.

The sector emulation of AF-512e hard drives can not be deactivated, as far as I know.

Ah, OK. Thank you. Good explanation.