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.