How can I determine the sector size on an external hard drive?
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Track title: Puzzle Island
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Chapters
00:00 How Can I Determine The Sector Size On An External Hard Drive?
00:36 Answer 1 Score 1
00:54 Accepted Answer Score 12
01:29 Answer 3 Score 8
01:50 Answer 4 Score 3
02:01 Thank you
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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/120809/h...
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Tags
#windows #harddrive
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 12
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.
ANSWER 2
Score 8
I just verified this with WMIC on my windows XP box. This is the query:
C:\>wmic DISKDRIVE get bytespersector, caption
BytesPerSector Caption
512 WDC WD1600AAJS-60M0A0
4096 TrekStor HDD USB Device
The newer Toshiba external disk is reported as 4096 bytes.
ANSWER 3
Score 3
I know that you dont use linux, but just for the record:
smartctl -i /dev/...
shows
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
ANSWER 4
Score 1
You can do this via a command prompt. Open up CMD (Windows+r then type cmd) and run chkdsk driveletter: chkdsk c: It will be listed as x bytes in each allocation unit.
