Some Seagate SATA and SAS drives have the ability to change sector size between 512 to 4096. Check the data sheet, product manual, or Feature Supported output in SeaChest to determine if your product supports changing sector size.
To reduce operating system interruptions, it is recommended that this be done using SeaChest Bootable.
WARNING: Before starting the process, first understand associated risks with changing the sector size.
- Any interruption while formatting may render the device inoperable.
- Set Sector may affect all LUNs/Namespaces for devices with multiple LUNs or namespaces.
- It is not recommended that this be done when connected via USB. Not all USB adapters support 4k sector size.
- Disable all out-of-band management systems/services/daemons before starting this process. These may cause interruptions which may prevent completion of a sector size change.
- Stop the smartmontools daemon (smartd)
- If the system appears to hang, please wait. SATA drives are unable to return from this command until it has completely formatted the device. The longest possible time to wait is 5 hours (this is still significantly faster than a full drive format). This is much more common when running an installed OS with the boot drive on the same HBA/bus as the drive being formatted due to the way the SATA interface works with this command.
- After the change is complete, the drive will perform background data integrity and reliability operations which may prevent it from entering lower power states based on configured timers. This background process time varies based on capacity and commands issued as it is paused each time a new command is received. This background process does NOT need to be completed before writing data to the drive. In fact, writing data to the drive reduces the amount of time the background process needs to run.
Items to note:
- The USB drive used to create the SeaChest bootable USB needs to be 32GB or smaller.
- To navigate up and down, hold shift and press page up and page down.
- The following steps can be used for Windows with slight modifications. Instead of /dev/sgX, use PDX, where X is the number of the drive.
- If you have the drive connected to a RAID controller, the physical address of the drive may be displayed differently than the examples in this article. The correct address should be shown when scanning drives.
- If you are running an older version of SeaChest, the command may be FormatUnit. It is recommended that you download the latest version of SeaChest.
To change the sector size:
- Download SeaChest Utilities (CLI) zip file
- Extract zip file
- Configure your environment
- Install SeaChest for Windows
- On Linux, SeaChest files may need to be made executable
- Create bootable USB SeaChest (Recommended)
- Example, run SeaChest_Format –s to list connected drives. If using bootable, this will be done automatically.
- Locate the drive:
- For Linux and Bootable, the drive will display /dev/sgX - where X is the number associated with your drive.
- For Windows, the drive will display PDX - where X is the number associated with your drive.
- Run SeaChest_Format with the desired sector size – either 4096 or 512
- Linux and Bootable example switching to 4096
- SeaChest_Format –d /dev/sg1 --setSectorSize 4096 –confirm this-will-erase-data-and-may-render-the-drive-inoperable
- Press Enter
- Allow the process to complete
- Windows example switching to 4096
- SeaChest_Format –d PD1 --setSectorSize 4096 –confirm this-will-erase-data-and-may-render-the-drive-inoperable
- Press Enter
- Allow the process to complete
- Once complete, run SeaChest_Format with the –i to confirm that the sector size has been changed successfully.
- Linux and Bootable example - SeaChest_Format –d /dev/sg1 -i
- Windows example – SeaChest_Format –d PD1 -i
If you want to confirm everything is working, reboot the computer and run the short generic test on the drive. If you are using SeaChest bootable, then you will need to use poweroff to shut down the computer after confirming that the sector size was changed.
