When is 512b sector emulation active

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello everybody,

I’d like to ask if the WD80EFZX would work on my relatively old raid controller (3ware 9650). When I asked the support of the controller manufacturer about the possibility of using driver larger than 4TB I got this response:

“Yes but the drive must support 512 byte emulation, not 4k native sector size.
Make sure that the drives you choose are backwards compatible with controllers that do not support 4k advanced format.”

So I understand big disks nowadays internally use 4k sectors in any case, but may behave like a 512byte sector disk to the OS or the controller.
But under which circumscances is this emulation active? Is that something the disk manufacturer chooses to activate or not or can I control that behaviour with firmware commands or a jumper?

Best regards,
Jens

2

Hi,

As a recommendation, contact WD Support for direct assistance on this case.

WD Contact info:

3

Did just that a minute ago. I tried it already yesterday, but because of error messages it wouldn’t open my ticket.

Thanks!