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Change Bytes per Physical Sector

Nana Sutisna 86 Reputation points
2021-05-17T10:15:19.97+00:00

Dear All,

I find "Bytes per Physical Sector" on fsutil info is 512, I want to change it to be 4K, how to do that?

Regards,
Nana Sutisna

Windows Server
Windows Server
A family of Microsoft server operating systems that support enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.
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  1. Dave Patrick 426.3K Reputation points MVP
    2021-05-17T12:55:42.597+00:00

    You can't change the sector size of a hard drive, the sectors are created when the hard drive is manufactured and can't be changed. You can change the NTFS cluster size (allocation unit size} of the file system using Disk Management when you format the disk.

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  1. Jenny Feng 14,086 Reputation points
    2021-05-18T02:10:23.117+00:00

    Hi,
    The sector size is an inherent characteristic of the drive and cannot be changed. 512 bytes was the most common size but many newer drives are now 4096 bytes (4 K).
    The drives are physically a 4k block storage, but the firmware in them is presenting the drive as 512 byte sectors, which is why you see a physical and logical sector size that are different. this is primarily for backwards compatibility with systems that don't recognize the 4k sector format.

    There is no need to modify any settings on your system.
    For your reference:
    Advanced format (4K) disk compatibility update
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/advanced-format-disk-compatibility-update

    Hope above information can help you.

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  2. Dave Patrick 426.3K Reputation points MVP
    2021-05-18T02:49:04.057+00:00

    You can change the allocation unit size when formatting the disk. There are third party utilities that you can use without format.

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  3. Vu Do 1 Reputation point
    2021-12-17T18:30:28.063+00:00

    I know this sounds really weird... I'm using Win11 and have a Samsung SSD 980 NVME hard drive. If I use the storage controller driver "Samsung NVME Controller" from Samsung, the Bytes Per Physical Sector on the Samsung 980 SSD is 512. If I change the storage controller driver to "Standard NVM Express Controller" from Microsoft, the Bytes Per Physical Sector on the Samsung 980 SSD become 4096. Despites the changes, the data stored on the SSD is still functional(app can be run and files can be read,...)

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