Hard drives are transitioning from 512 byte to 4096 byte sector sizes, and it looks like Windows XP won't support these newer drives without additional software (such as WDalign from Western Digital)
My question is: how does this affect external hard drives? I'll be buying a 1TB USB external drive, and it'll be plugged into a mix of Windows 7 and XP machines. Is there an easy way to tell what the sector size on an external hard drive is?
Answer
Run wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index from a Windows Command Prompt. The output looks like:
BlockSize Index Name StartingOffset
512 0 Disk #0, Partition #0 1048576
512 1 Disk #0, Partition #1 105906176
512 0 Disk #1, Partition #0 32256
Where block size is the drive's sector size. It unfortunately doesn't list the drive letter.
Also as I understand the article, the drive will still list that it has 512 byte sectors even though internally it uses 4kb sectors. So the only way may be to get the drive's spec sheet.
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