4Kn HDDs vs 512e

[bryan3636]

Has anyone benchmarked using 4Kn HDDs compared to 512e HDDs for their backup repository? I'm looking at building a new backup server with local storage. I'm compared to storage options:

1. Seagate ST12000NM0007 12TB 512e
2. Seagate ST10000NM0206 10TB 4Ke

While the 12TB is still cost-effective, I'm wondering which will give me the best performance. This will be installed on a Windows 2016 Standard server. Veeam supports both types of drives. Dell has an article that shows a 14% performance different in IOPS between 4Kn vs 512e. I can't find much other benchmarking though. Furthermore, both drives have nearly the same specs. For example, they both have a "Max. Sustained Transfer Rate OD" of 249 MiB/s. If it makes any difference, my storage repository will consist of 8 drives connected to an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-8I in RAID 6.

Writing large amounts of data should be more efficient (and therefore faster) on 4Kn drives, but has anyone experienced this in the real world?

[nmdange]

Seagate offers 4kn and 512e in any drive size. Since there's no chance 512e would be faster than 4kn, I would go for the 4kn drive since Windows supports 4kn drives. Though, I would actually recommend HGST drives over Seagate https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-driv ... r-dc-hc520