4Kn vs 512e SSD Sector Size in terms of performance

So I just got my new laptop which has a 2TB Sabrent Rocket Plus (OS) and a 4TB Sabrent Rocker (Storage)

I was searching on Sabrent's site to see if they had a special NVMe driver (which they don't) but came across this a utility called the Sabrent Sector Size Converter and noticed that both of them are using a 512e sector size.

I did some research as to which is better and the only thing I could find is that for older OSes like Windows 7 you cannot use 4K and the drive has to be using 512e for the sector size.

I converted them both to 4K (yes I had to format and reinstall the OS) just to see the performance difference and here it is, I don't know if there is really a tangible improvement or perhaps the results are higher when using 4K just as a margin of error so take what you will out of this.

Sabrent Rocket PLUS 2TB



Sabrent Rocket Q 4TB



@tilleroftheearth

 

It’s not margin of error, at the same time it won’t be a night & day difference either as your results show, 4K should be more efficient as there’s less overhead involved. Remember the physical/native sector size on the SSD is 4K regardless of if it’s set to 512 Emulation or 4K.

 

Off topic: what happend to the rather expensive area51-2?

 

Sold

 

Never seen 512e drives with NVMe. All drives mention 4K compatible, is there anyway to check it on non-Sabrent drives? I remember seagate having this tool for their 2.5TB and upwards HDD so that W7 could see whole disk space or something.
I have always deleted existing partitions and re-initialized as new disk either using Linux's GParted/Gnome Disk or Windows disk management.

 

Almost all are 512 (compatibility).

 

Western Digital's SSD Dashboard can tell you if the SSD is 4K Aligned or not. Not sure about other SSDs

 

I'd also be curious if anyone with the same drives and an AMD platform can test for this.

See:
Intel: Rocket Lake's PCIe 4.0 Storage Performance is 11% Faster Than AMD Ryzen | Tom's Hardware


@Spartan@HIDevolution, 4K alignment is not the same thing.

 

As tiller said alignment is different. Misaligned disks would end up having 4K data clusters written in overlapping physical blocks reducing performance.

Now since it was brought up, coming to how to check alignment, you can do that without any special tool, go to the Windows "System Information" utility and go to Components->Storage->Disks and look at Partition Offset heading of disk in question; if divisible by 4096 it's 4K aligned.



Misalignment also can lead to a nice dent in performance, look at the aligned and non aligned benchmarks in the below link:
https://www.reneelab.com/4k-alignment-introduction.html

 

Maybe take a look in this Win-raid forum thread for solutions " Which NVMe Drivers are the best (performance related)?"
https://www.win-raid.com/t3975f46-W...he-best-performance-related-11.html#msg138148