How Can We Help?
4KN Hard Drive Limitation
| Format | Logical Sector Size | Physical Sector Size |
| 512n | 512 | 512 |
| 512e | 512 | 4,096 |
| 4Kn | 4,096 | 4,096 |
Does current GA version of vSphere and VSAN support 4K Native drives?
No. 4K Native drives are not supported in current GA releases of vSphere and VSAN.
Does current GA version of vSphere and VSAN support 512e drives?
No. 512e drives are not supported with the current versions of vSphere and VSAN due to potential performance issues when using these drives
LSI 2108 and Intel & AMD onboard SATA RAID controllers do not support 4KN Advanced Format HD
512N/512E/4KN
The Sectors sizes are either of below
512N – 512 bytes in one packet (Native)
512E – written as 4096 bytes in one packet but making it look like 512 with a read modify write (Emulation)
4kN (Native) 4096 bytes written in one packet.
Many computer manufacturing processes are based on 512N sectors. 512E Emulation provides backward compatibility for 512N sector based processes and applications. (But not applied on VMware )
Why move to 4KN sectors: To improved performance and lower incidents of unrecoverable errors.
*Initial format efficiency improvements in the 10 – 15% range, quickly growing to 30% by ~2015.
However, currently 4KN is still an advance technology which cannot apply to all of computer manufacturing processes.