{"id":692,"date":"2011-08-16T23:18:49","date_gmt":"2011-08-16T23:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/?p=692"},"modified":"2019-11-13T08:08:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T08:08:39","slug":"4kb-sector-sized-disks-and-the-seagate-freeagent-goflex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/4kb-sector-sized-disks-and-the-seagate-freeagent-goflex","title":{"rendered":"4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Hi everyone,<\/p>\n<p>For some time, the Microsoft Block Level Backup engine has had difficulties backing up to 4kB sector sized disks. The VHD libraries that it uses rely on 512B sectors on the backup disk.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The short story:<\/strong> please avoid the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex disks. A full explanation is below. We are also looking out for reports of other incompatible hardware.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The long story:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For many months I have been trying to find 4kB sector disks so we could produce a KB article of incompatible hardware. However it has not been that straightforward. I have learnt the following:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Most, if not all disks nowadays have physical 4kB sectors, BUT the on-disk controller emulates it as 512B sectors<\/li>\n<li>Therefore, at the SATA interface, computers will see most (if not all) disks as having 512B sectors<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So if I were to draw a diagram, it would be:<\/p>\n<p>Physical disk platters [4kB sectors] &lt;= &nbsp;Controller [512B sector emulation ] &lt;= SATA Interface &#8211; sees 512B sectors<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have been unsuccessful in finding a disk that actually looks like it has 4kB sectors.<\/li>\n<li>In my travels, I have encountered only 2 devices that report 4kB sectors\n<ul>\n<li>A very early Samsung 2.5&#8243; 640GB USB 2.0 hard drive, probably about 2 years ago. Unfortunately this drive died early and I discarded it before I could do proper testing on it.\n<ul>\n<li>Subsequent Samsung 2.5&#8243; USB drives don&#8217;t suffer from this problem. We bought (this year) a 640GB drive that at the SATA interface had 512B sectors.<\/li>\n<li>The actual hard drive itself doesn&#8217;t seem to suffer fro the problem. I plugged a 640GB drive into a SATA interface and it reported 512B sectors<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex interface (SATA -&gt; USB 3.0) which&nbsp;<strong>is available for purchase now<\/strong> and I actually bought two last month when I was in Vegas.\n<ul>\n<li>If you plug a 3TB drive in there, it looks as if the drive has 4kB sectors<\/li>\n<li>If you plug a 1TB drive in there, it looks as if the drive has 512B sectors!<\/li>\n<li>The conversion from 512B to 4kB sectors is done in the SATA -&gt; USB 3.0 controller itself, NOT in the drive. For example, I plugged in a Hitachi 3TB disk into the interface and got 4kB sectors. But when plugged straight into SATA, it looks like it has 512B sectors.<\/li>\n<li>The reason why the controller does this is because:\n<ul>\n<li>Windows XP only supports MBR partition tables, not GPT<\/li>\n<li>As such, it can only address a limited number of sectors, and with a 512B sector size, this equates to an addressable space of about 2.2TB<\/li>\n<li>However, if you use 4kB sectors, this expands 8 fold!<\/li>\n<li>So Seagate&#8217;s controller emulates 4kB sectors so that Windows XP can address the full 3TB disk with the MBR partition table<\/li>\n<li>This emulation is not needed in Vista \/ 2008 \/ 7 \/ 2008 R2, BUT Seagate wanted to support XP so they did it anyway<\/li>\n<li>The downside is that backups don&#8217;t work to the device on Vista \/ 2008 \/ 7 \/ 2008 R2<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p>So a similar diagram is:<\/p>\n<p>Physical disk platters [4kB sectors] &lt;= &nbsp;Controller [512B sector emulation ] &lt;= SATA Interface &lt;= SATA to USB Interface on GoFlex [4kB sector emulation] &lt;= USB Interface sees 4kB sectors<\/p>\n<p>Lessons:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Avoid the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex hardware\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s not the hard drive, but the interface, that causes the problem<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Please be on the lookout for other incompatible hardware and post a reply to this blog article. Our resellers have asked us to start a website of backup hardware reviews, and that&#8217;s something I&#8217;ll look at doing in the coming months.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thanks all, and I hope this helps everyone understand this problem better.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers,<\/p>\n<p>Linus<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi everyone, For some time, the Microsoft Block Level Backup engine has had difficulties backing up to 4kB sector sized disks. The VHD libraries that it uses rely on 512B sectors on the backup disk. The short story: please avoid the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex disks. A full explanation is below. We are also looking out &#8230; <a title=\"4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/4kb-sector-sized-disks-and-the-seagate-freeagent-goflex\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-support","category-legacy"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex - Cyber Resilience Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/4kb-sector-sized-disks-and-the-seagate-freeagent-goflex\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex - Cyber Resilience Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hi everyone, For some time, the Microsoft Block Level Backup engine has had difficulties backing up to 4kB sector sized disks. The VHD libraries that it uses rely on 512B sectors on the backup disk. The short story: please avoid the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex disks. A full explanation is below. We are also looking out ... 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He founded BackupAssist in 2002 \u2014 making him one of the longest-standing voices in Windows backup and data protection \u2014 and has spent the decades since talking to IT administrators around the world about what actually goes wrong, and why. His interest in data loss isn't abstract. Early in his career, he was working at the Monash University help desk when a student came in with a floppy disk that wouldn't read. They tried everything. None of their drives could read it either. The disk held her entire PhD dissertation \u2014 years of work \u2014 and it was the only copy. She broke down in tears. There was nothing he could do. Five years later, he wrote the first version of BackupAssist. Linus holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and has held Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and Sun Certified Java Programmer credentials. More recently, he has completed digital forensics and cyber-security courses through the Black Hat Conference. He has spoken on information security and cryptography at Infosecurity Europe, addressed politicians and policymakers at Australian Parliament House, presented to SMB IT administrators at the IT Pro Experts Conference, and served as a guest lecturer to Cyber Security master's students at the University of Melbourne. On this blog, Linus writes about backup strategy and the technical side of cyber-resilience \u2014 drawing on 24 years of product development and direct conversation with the IT professionals BackupAssist is built for. [Connect with Linus on LinkedIn](https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/linuschang\/)\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/author\/linus-chang\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex - Cyber Resilience Blog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/4kb-sector-sized-disks-and-the-seagate-freeagent-goflex","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"4kB Sector sized disks and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex - Cyber Resilience Blog","og_description":"Hi everyone, For some time, the Microsoft Block Level Backup engine has had difficulties backing up to 4kB sector sized disks. The VHD libraries that it uses rely on 512B sectors on the backup disk. The short story: please avoid the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex disks. 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He founded BackupAssist in 2002 \u2014 making him one of the longest-standing voices in Windows backup and data protection \u2014 and has spent the decades since talking to IT administrators around the world about what actually goes wrong, and why. His interest in data loss isn't abstract. Early in his career, he was working at the Monash University help desk when a student came in with a floppy disk that wouldn't read. They tried everything. None of their drives could read it either. The disk held her entire PhD dissertation \u2014 years of work \u2014 and it was the only copy. She broke down in tears. There was nothing he could do. Five years later, he wrote the first version of BackupAssist. Linus holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and has held Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and Sun Certified Java Programmer credentials. More recently, he has completed digital forensics and cyber-security courses through the Black Hat Conference. He has spoken on information security and cryptography at Infosecurity Europe, addressed politicians and policymakers at Australian Parliament House, presented to SMB IT administrators at the IT Pro Experts Conference, and served as a guest lecturer to Cyber Security master's students at the University of Melbourne. On this blog, Linus writes about backup strategy and the technical side of cyber-resilience \u2014 drawing on 24 years of product development and direct conversation with the IT professionals BackupAssist is built for. [Connect with Linus on LinkedIn](https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/linuschang\/)","url":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/author\/linus-chang"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13938,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions\/13938"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}