Oracle Solaris can support large capacity disks, also known as advanced format (AF) disks. AF disks are hard disk drives that exceed the traditional 512-byte block size that previous releases support.
AF disks are generally in the 4-KB block size range, but vary as follows:
A 4-KB native disk (4kn) has a physical and logical block size of 4 KB
A 512-byte emulation (512e) has a physical block size of 4 KB but reports a logical block size of 512 bytes
Oracle Solaris also supports the 512-byte native (512n) disk, which is a traditional disk with 512-byte block size.
Before purchasing advanced format drives, confirm with your device manufacturer that their 512e devices have a power-safe feature. This feature prevents data loss after a power failure while data is still in transit.
To determine if your system has AFD-supported disks, use the devprop command.
# devprop -n device-path
The following examples show the command output for different disk types.
For a 4-Kb native disk
# devprop -n /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 device-blksize device-pblksize 4096 4096
For a 512n disk
# devprop -n /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 device-blksize device-pblksize 512 512
For a 512e disk
# devprop -n /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0 device-blksize device-pblksize 512 4096