Which is best, 512-bytes or 4K bytes For Sabrent 1tb m.2 pci 4.0 drive

Once my Sabrent rocket 1TB pcie 4.0 m.2 arrives it comes with the blocks set to the non standard block settings but it can be switched with the included software to either 512-bytes or 4K bytes.

What I was wondering is since I will be doing a fresh instal is, would 512 bytes be better/faster than using 4k byte blocks & would using the non standard block size affect gaming data or should the 2 block settings be tested independantly for speed increases or will it just be the same speed ?

Any information would be of great help to me ?

Thank in advance.

RB

I used 512 Bytes but I am no expert on it. The Drive works well.

@RoadBlaster -

Personally, I would stay with the 512 versus the 4kn sector size. The drive is only 1 TB - no need for 4kn.for that capacity. No advantage.
Additionally, the SSD needs to support 4kn in the controller chip - I don't know if Sabrent does this. Look at the SSD specification.

As for the OS, W10 does the 4kn support natively.

HTH

Compumind said:

@RoadBlaster -

Personally, I would stay with the 512 versus the 4kn sector size. The drive is only 1 TB - no need for 4kn.for that capacity. No advantage.
Additionally, the SSD needs to support 4kn in the controller chip - I don't know if Sabrent does this. Look at the SSD specification.

As for the OS, W10 does the 4kn support natively.

HTH

The Sabrent drive comes with 4k block set on it as read on Amazon reviews about how people had trouble cloning their w10 to the drive before they realised it was set to 4k blocks instead of 512 Bytes, so wondering if there would be a boost in performance really !

I may try it & report back in the next couple of weeks but I am enjoying reading the replies to help me decide.

RoadBlaster said:

The Sabrent drive comes with 4k block set on it as read on Amazon reviews about how people had trouble cloning their w10 to the drive before they realised it was set to 4k blocks instead of 512 Bytes, so wondering if there would be a boost in performance really.

It's up to you. Honestly, you won't see any perceptible gain.
Now, if this was an HDD, that might be different.

Remember SSD's have a finite amount of write cycles.

Samsung and Toshiba are the leaders in SSD technology, followed by Micron.

If the drive uses 4k blocks out of the factory, I would be inclined to leave at 4k, after all you would expect the manufacturers to know what is best for their drive.
Also this post may be of interest to you, mentioning "advanced format drives" on Linus Tech Tips forums.
How do shifted sectors affect Windows? (OS partition is shifted) - Storage Devices - Linus Tech Tips

Samsung and Toshiba are the leaders in SSD technology, followed by Micron.

On PCIe 4.0 Sabrent are 1st & the gigabyte one is 2nd place (It is a big price difference but about the same R/W speeds) & samsung is stuck with PCIe 3.0 speeds untill the world catches up, Sabrent is the winner for now as cheaper than Gigabytes one, as seen in online pc magazine reviews.

Thanks for all you comments & will post Crystal Disk Benchmarks when installed.

Regards

RB

Here is a small chart of comparason between PCIe 3.0 & PCIe 4.0, as you see there is a significant difference between 3.0 & 4.0.



! Sum = (Read Speed) Minus (Write Speed) to help see the difference in R/W !

So Sabrent 1Tb arrived today & for now using it as a game file drive & just defragged a 95GB game file in 5 mins - if that is a sign to come of the speed it has then looking forward to installing V2004, when Microsoft finally pull their fingers out......???

Before you ask I always defrag the game files once as when it is either direct internet download or drive to drive transfer, it makes a real mess of the drive & after analysing before defrag it is 1% performance & After it goes back up to 100%.

So all the hype about not defrag ssd seems to be fake, why does defrag affect the ssd speed so much ???

The issue with defragging an SSD is more the excess writes needed to a memory type that has a limited number of write cycles.
To defrag an SSD the controller will need to make significantly more writes than on a normal HDD because of the way data is stored and written, in order to move parts of a file into contiguous areas, the controller needs to copy the partial data to another spare area, including the new data to add, then clear the original area (doing this for all data until a contiguous area large enough is cleared) , then write the data back. This increases the write cycles needed.
As far as SSD's go, in theory since there are no moving parts, data can be read from different areas of the drive at the same speed so fragmentation doesn't play a part, unlike mechanical HDs. And SSD's fragment files to even out the writes across the memory to avoid wearing out some blocks before others.