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Are 4k sectors more efficient for hard disk data transfer?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026871 views
Confidence Score0%
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Problem

I have just obtained two hard drives which use 4k sectors, but report their physical sector size to the OS as only 512 bytes. Does this mean that the OS must send eight requests to the drive to read 4k of data, whereas a true 4k drive could transfer the same amount of data with a single request? Is…

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Fix for: Are 4k sectors more efficient for hard disk data transfer?

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ALL harddisks with 4k sectors report 512 byte to the OS for compatibility reasons: Think of BIOS, DOS or Windows. The "cached" performance does not change, as 512 byte sector devices can already read and write multiple sectors at once. Most filesyst…

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