Changing sector size on Seagate Ironwolf 10TB & 12TB HDDs

TrueNAS General
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Recently I ordered a new Seagate 12TB Ironwolf HDD, (and paid extra due the the AI tax :-(. However, it arrived with 512 byte sectors, (or at least defaulting to 512e). I wanted full native 4096 byte sector sizes.

Poking around the Internet, I found that Seagate has a tool to change the sector size on it’s hard disk drives, called “SeaChest”. It even has a Linux x86_64 version, in the Lite download. I had to play around with my various external enclosures, (see below), to find one that would work.

The commands were pretty simple. Run the scan to find Seagate drives and their “sg” number. Ask the Seagate drives if they support 4096 byte sector sizes. Then perform the change. Wait many hours, (hopefully you’ve put the computer and disk on a UPS!).

Afterward, the disk reports 4096 byte native sector size.

Here are the commands, adjust as needed. (Or read the docs…)

SeaChest_Lite_linux_x86_64 --scan
SeaChest_Lite_linux_x86_64 -d /dev/sgX --showSupportedFormats
SeaChest_Lite_linux_x86_64 -d /dev/sgX --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-e
rase-data-and-may-render-the-drive-inoperable

Since I was happy with the change to the 12TB HDD, I wanted to perform the same change to my Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDD. This disk had backup data, but trivial to copy the pool to the new 12TB HDD. The 10TB HDD changed to 4096 sector size just fine too.


On the bad side, I found out that 2 of my 3 external USB & eSATA enclosures won't work with 4096 native sector sizes. To be fair, they are pretty old, but I thought at least the eSATA interface would work. Nope...

The very oldest USB & eSATA enclosure is really, really old and if I recall correctly, it’s USB interface won’t support large disks, (like 4TB). But, it’s eSATA does work. So bonus.

I bought a new USB & eSATA enclosure, which has both interfaces working with 512 & 4096 byte sector sizes. Bad news is that it has no fan… oh well.

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That is interesting to know.

i knew about SeaChest Tools, but the USB interface, well I’m certain we have all heard that some work well, some do not. The 4TB limit is real for a lot of the older hardware.

As for the SeaChest Tools, I am a bit surprised by the command line that clearly states that the drive may be rendered inoperable. Eh, that is Seagate.

When I started reading your posting I was hoping it would say “When I reformatted my 10TB drives, they become 12TB native drives”, but no such luck. I was thinking positive thoughts.

I just looked up the price for one of these drives, OUCH! Imagine buying a pair of 28TB drives. That is crazy money.

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I use one of the iSTAR external SAS enclosures (like this 4-bay). It easily connects up to an HBA (which every TrueNAS install should have) and gives me quick hot swap for testing drives with all the features that the server itself sees.

For 2.5” disks, I use an HP tool-free adapter.

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Looks like a nice product.

However, for my use case, I want a single disk enclosure that I can move to my various computers, for single disk backups. (I have both NAS for backups and archival storage, and several single disks for backups only.)

My search still goes on, for a single 3.5" disk enclosure, with eSATA and USB 3, (& UASP), AND most importantly, a fan. An attempt to copy 2TB failed before 500GBs was copied. Twice. Either with the source in the fanless enclosure. Or destination in the fanless enclosure.

So for the moment I am going with an USB 3 enclosure, (hopefully it has UASP), WITH fan.


To those that think a 2TB copy is a one off event, think again. A 2TB backup, (using ZFS to detect bad blocks), does need a scrub for each backup group. (About 6 to 8 scrubs a year.) Thus, reading all 2TB, which failed on the fanless enclosure before 500GBs were read.