Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2 TB + PS5 Heatsink

[Solid State Brain]

Interesting. A bit better on randoms, good. How did you convert it? If under linux, could it be done on a live image like Parted Magic, since I don’t have (and don’t need) a linux install on another drive?

I did it as shown in the link below, from a separate SSD:

Switching your NVME ssd to 4k - Bjonnh.net

I recently got a WD SN850. There is a little trick to do when you receive it to switch it to 4k LBA and thus getting better performance by using native block size.

www.bjonnh.net

This method is universal for all NVMe SSDs that support changing the logical sector size (i.e. you will not need to look for vendor-specific tools to change it). You could probably do it also from a live Linux distribution, but you will likely need to install nvme-cli tools first (e.g. from Ubuntu that would be accomplished with "apt-get install nvme-cli").

But again, this performance difference that I personally observed could be just due to Windows 11 having performance issues with NVMe SSDs under certain configurations. It needs to be tested in a more controlled environment using Windows 10 or Linux. It might also be that some models will show larger differences than others.

 

[fb020997]

I did it as shown in the link below, from a separate SSD:

Switching your NVME ssd to 4k - Bjonnh.net

I recently got a WD SN850. There is a little trick to do when you receive it to switch it to 4k LBA and thus getting better performance by using native block size.

www.bjonnh.net

This method is universal for all NVMe SSDs that support changing the logical sector size (i.e. you will not need to look for vendor-specific tools to change it). You could probably do it also from a live Linux distribution, but you will likely need to install nvme-cli tools first (e.g. from Ubuntu that would be accomplished with "apt-get install nvme-cli").

But again, this performance difference that I personally observed could be just due to Windows 11 having performance issues with NVMe SSDs under certain configurations. It needs to be tested in a more controlled environment using Windows 10 or Linux. It might also be that some models will show larger differences than others.

Many thanks, I already read that link, but didn’t know that nvme-cli was a package that has to be installed, I thought that linux had it by default. Thankfully, Parted Magic has it. With the release “22H1” or whatever it‘ll be called Win11, I’m going to do a secure erase+4K conversion+clean install on my SN850 and do a couple of tests.
Not that I need an more performance (or even NVMe-4.0 performance, BTW)…

 

[Solid State Brain]

I made a dedicated thread on the subject by the way. Perhaps it's getting too much off-topic here, although Sabrent does provide a tool for changing the sector size on Rocket 4 SSDs.

Setting 4k sector size on NVMe SSDs: does performance actually change?

NVMe specifications allow the host to send specific low-level commands to the SSD in order to permanently format the drive to 4096 bytes logical sector size (it is possible to go back to a 512 bytes size in the same way). Not all NVMe SSDs have this capability. Most client-oriented storage...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Mussels]

@Mussel I made a test about a week ago when I first got it, which showed slight differences between the two settings, but with Windows 11 having consistency issues with NVMe write performance as everybody later found, it could have been due mainly because of that. I didn't test it on Linux with fast filesystems like EXT4, however (which is what the user who claimed 10% faster performance with the SN850 in 4Kn mode was using).

A windows update came out around that time to fix it, FYI. The fix wasn't advertised well.

November 22, 2021—KB5007262 (OS Build 22000.348) Preview (microsoft.com)
^ Because it was a preview at this stage, it rolled out later for many people

 

[Solid State Brain]

I still get degraded write performance only on the C: partition, which is supposed to have the USN journal enabled, so I guess it did not fix the issue, or it's due to something else. I received KB5007262 on December 1st.

 

[Space Lynx]

2tb rocket on sale for $167 !!!! INSANE PRICE

damn if I could sell my 1tb p5 for about 75 bucks i might consider this

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/sjnxar

 

[Mussels]

2tb rocket on sale for $167 !!!! INSANE PRICE

damn if I could sell my 1tb p5 for about 75 bucks i might consider this

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/sjnxar

damn, thats insane