4Kn HDDs vs 512e

[FlintB]

Has anyone benchmarked using 4Kn HDDs compared to 512e HDDs? I'm looking at building a new backup server with local storage. I'm compared to storage options:

1. Seagate ST12000NM0007 12TB 512e
2. Seagate ST10000NM0206 10TB 4Ke

 

While the 12TB is still cost-effective, I'm wondering which will give me the best performance. This will be installed on a Windows 2016 Standard server. My application, Veeam Backup, supports both types of drives. Dell has an article that shows a 14% performance different in IOPS between 4Kn vs 512e. I can't find much other benchmarking though. Furthermore, both drives have nearly the same specs. For example, they both have a "Max. Sustained Transfer Rate OD" of 249 MiB/s. If it makes any difference, my storage repository will consist of 8 drives connected to an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-8I in RAID 6.

 

Writing large amounts of data should be more efficient (and therefore faster) on 4Kn drives, but has anyone benchmarked this or experienced this in the real world?

[KarathKasun]

4Ke physical format drives have lower IOPS because the smallest unit of data they can store is 4096(bytes or kbytes, cant recall off the top of my head).  512e format drives have a minimum data item size that is 1/8th that of the 4Ke drives, so there is less wasted read time for small files.

 

512e only makes sense for setups where you need lots of random transactions which are smaller than 4k.

[486DX40]

On 9/17/2018 at 4:43 PM, KarathKasun said:

4Ke physical format drives have lower IOPS because the smallest unit of data they can store is 4096(bytes or kbytes, cant recall off the top of my head).  512e format drives have a minimum data item size that is 1/8th that of the 4Ke drives, so there is less wasted read time for small files.

 

512e only makes sense for setups where you need lots of random transactions which are smaller than 4k.

AFAIK, 512e drives are also 4K physically, they just present themselves to the system as 512 bytes/sector (emulation).

[KarathKasun]

On 5/15/2019 at 1:15 PM, 486DX40 said:

AFAIK, 512e drives are also 4K physically, they just present themselves to the system as 512 bytes/sector (emulation).

The emulated drives move the write coalescing into the drive itself, but I do not have apples to apples data on how exactly this changes performance.