Then we switch 512e to 4k, unless, of course they are 4Kn Whenever we refresh our drives we always flash each batch with the same firmware revision. I manage PB scale storage arrays for a research center. I stumbled across this thread after running into some of the same issues mentioned and thought I would add how to flash your drives to the same rev. In an elevated (admin) Command Prompt window, scan for your drive with the command: Here's the solution for Windows (you can do it in Linux also, with similar command line options)

PS- Yes, I know that using ashift=12 works fine with 512e drives, that's not my question, I want to convert the drives to 4Kn using the Fast Format feature. What tool or command line option can I use to do this? Do you have to use the Seagate Seatools (it doesn't even appear to support it)? Does BSD or Windows support this? Or sg_format? Or parted? I've search all over the web and cannot find any information on this. This is documented in the Seagate documentation, but they neglect to say how you do it, and with what tool. They come formatted in 512e by default, but they support 'Fast Format' to convert to 4Kn so that they appear as a true 4Kn to the OS. I'm planning to purchase some Seagate Exos X16 (model ST16000NM001G) 16TB drives.

Seagate seatools windows 10