How to use/format Native 4Kn drives in Synology or NAS

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A few years ago I started using 4Kn drives in my storage (Open-E and Synology NAS). You had to decide for a 4Kn (native) drive or a 512-byte drive when buying it.

Now, a few years later, companies like Western Digital (HGST) and Seagate come with ‘Advanced Format’ drives, it’s one drive which you can use in 512-byte mode or 4Kn mode. I recently bought two Western Digital (HGST) Ultrastar DC HC550 (18TB) drives and had some struggles with them to use them in my Synology NAS as 4Kn drives. See how I fixed it..

I inserted the drives in my Synology (DS1817+) and when I wanted to create a new Volume it showed me the following:

So I opened an SSH session to the Synology and did an fdisk --list which showed me it was having a sectors of 512 bytes instead of 4096 bytes:

Even after connecting the disk to my Laptop using an Aptgtek USB to SATA converter and formatting it using Windows 10 with a different sector size, it still showed as non 4Kn drive in the Synology.

Then I used the tool: “Hugo” which is a Western Digital proprietary tool and can be downloaded here.
I used version 7.0.3 for Windows and used the following commands:

To detect the disk:

C:\Program Files\WDC\HUGO\bin>hugo s --device

Manuf. Model Serial Interface Capacity Type Firmware
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) SanDisk X600 1839E0805995 SATA 256 GB SSD X6114012
Device handles: \\.\PhysicalDrive0
2) HGST WUH721818ALE6L4 3WG7MU9K SATA 18000 GB HDD PCGNW120
Device handles: \\.\PhysicalDrive2

To format the disk:

C:\Program Files\WDC\HUGO\bin>hugo format -g \\.\PhysicalDrive2 -b 4096 --fastformat -n max

******************************** WARNING **********************************

The Format command will result in loss of data on the specified device.

This device might be your boot device and it won't be protected.

******************************** WARNING **********************************

Are you sure you want to Format this device? (Y/N) Y

Format device on 1 Device(s)...
Failed: Format command Failed on device 3WG7MU9K.
Device will not be formatted.

Even though it fails to format the disk, it does write the sector size / partition table to it and when you insert the drive in you Synology now, it will show you 4096 byte sector size and you can now create your 4Kn volume!