Let me be honest with you. I blacklisted the satellite from asia since then. I was fed up to listening my HDD’s are ticking in every 0.5 seconds. Haven’t got soo much data from there anyway.
Oh, apologies, I missed the n part. But the emulated or native isn’t really important as long as the drive is 4K on the hardware level, since it is getting the benefit of lower overhead. You can use it as a 4k sector drive or reformat it to 4Kn and again use it as 4k sector drive… Best to reformat to avoid any possible headaches.
This is not a matter of “formatting”. There are certain Seagate drives that allow you to re-flash the controller and thereby switch the operating mode. Unless your drive supports such a technique, you are stuck with the state the drive was delivered in
Well I can’t speak for all the manufacturers, but in my experience, they were changed by using a “format” command. I suppose they do simply “switch” internally from outputting 512 bytes to 4k without a low level reformat, like you say.
I guess the reason for factory 512e mode drives is that there is at least one software that would be incompatible with these sectors and there would be more than 0 irate customers “blaming” the drive manufacturer, as is the case usually. Probably why everyone stocks the 512e variants - safer for them.
This satellite is really weird. I am seeing sizes 512, 768 and 1536. Only put repairs have “normal” sizes like you would expect from uploads through different users/customer usage.