Newbie help: can I use 4kn drives with this hardware - office PC from 2016?

TrueNAS General
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Apologies if this is a basic question. I have built a TrueNAS system recently using on old Lenovo slim desktop PC built in 2016 (ideacentre 300S-11IBR). The HDDs are plugged directly into the motherboard.

This is running fine with the very old 2TB drives from my old NAS. This was my initial experiment but now I want to upgrade the drives. I am thinking of using these:

WD 3.5in 26.1MM 10000GB 256MB 7200RPM SATA ULTRA 4KN SE DC HC510 (HUH721010ALN604)

However these are Advanced Format, 4KN, which is something I was not familiar with before today.

I’m sure TrueNAS won’t have an issue with these drives. But is the motherboard SATA controller on my old PC hardware likely to be compatible with them?

If necessary, is it possible or advisable to convert these drives to 512e?

EDIT: I found the following specs for the PC, and it’s dated February 2015. The only thing it mentions about onboard SATA is “SATA 6.0Gb/s controller, two SATA 6.0Gb/s connectors”.

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Of course you can , but do not expect miracles. just set it up and check the speeds , if they not bothering you , leave it , if not you have to get faster hardware.

more or faster memory, a faster network card , also depends on the rest of the network, en so on , the sky is the limit

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Thanks. Do you mean that of course the SATA controller will be compatible? Or that I would be able to convert the drives to 512e (and that the controller would be compatible with 512e)?

Regarding performance. My (very) old NAS was a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo V2. My new TrueNAS system gives better performance than the old NAS, and can sauturate the 1Gb/s interface. I am guessing the WD drives I mentioned won’t be slower than the old drives, both being 7200 RPM.

After upgrading the drives I may ugrade the rest of the hardware one day, but for now I have no plans for that. It was a free machine and it works.

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use the ZFS file format, it will sortout the optimation of your disks

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SATA and SAS don’t care about the block size or drive format. They only see LBA (locical block numbers). It’s the OS that needs to be able to handle 4k blocks, and TrueNAS is totally fine with that.

1 Like
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I think this is what I was looking for confirmation on - that the hardware doersn’t matter, as long as the OS supports AF.

As my hardware is Lenovo, I had a look and found this from Lenovo, dated 2014: Advanced Format HDD Technology Overview, which says on page 7:

“Non-RAID host bus adapters (HBAs) directly pass the information about the drive’s sector
sizes to the host. Therefore, the Advanced Format compatibility issues are unlikely”

I’m not using an HBA, rather the motherboard connectors. But I guess the message is that the controller does’t know or care about block size.

And I could apparently use the WD Hugo software to convert to 512e if there is a problem. Another fallback might be to buy an HBA, as I have a slot free.

I probably seem overly cautious, but although the PC was free I am about to drop well over AUD$1000 on two HDDs which can’t be returned unless they are faulty.

Thanks.