Dell PowerEdge R730 Supported Operating Systems on Dell PowerEdge Servers - Page 9

4.3 5 5.1 5.2 Mixing drives If you decide to use a mix of drive types, but do not resolve these issues, the overall storage performance may be lower than expected. To mix drives, you must have a good understanding of the operating system, applications, and the configuration such as RAID, volumes, and so on. To ensure compatible drive mix, check with your Dell team. Preparing for and managing the 4K transition Now that you understand the benefits of migrating to 4K sectors, as well as the potential impacts to performance, let's look at ways to manage this transition through the context of applications and operating systems. Managing 4K sectors in the Windows environment The single most important aspect of managing the transition to 4K sectors is related to the 512-byte emulation drive alignment issues described in section 4. Advanced Format drives work well in an Alignment 0 condition, where the physical to logical starting position are equal. Alignment conditions are created when the hard drive partition(s) is created. Enterprise Windows support for 4K sector media Table 3 lists the Microsoft Windows support policy for various media and their resulting reported sector sizes. • Logical"sector:"The"unit"that"is"used"for"logical"blocks"addressing"for"the"media."We"can"also"think" of"it"as"the"smallest"unit"of"write"that"the"storage"can"accept." • Physical"sector:"The"unit"for"which"read"and"write"operations"to"the"device"are"completed"in"a" single"operation."This"is"the"unit"of"atomic"write. Table 3 Windows support Drive formats Reported logical sector size Reported physical sector size Windows version with support 512-byte Native, 512n 512 bytes 512 bytes All Windows versions Advanced Format, 512e, 512 bytes AF, 512-byte Emulation 4096 bytes Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2008 R2 with MS KB 982018 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Windows Server 2008 with MS KB 2553708 Advanced Format, AF, 4K 4096 bytes Native, 4Kn* 4096 bytes Windows Server 2012 (4k data disks are supported and as boot disks in UEFI mode) Note that Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 do not support 512e or 4Kn media. While the system may boot up and operate minimally, there may be functionality issues, data loss, or suboptimal performance. Dell does not recommend using 512e media with Windows Server 2003. 9 512e and 4Kn Disk Formats