4k Sectors: Which Drives Don't Lie About Having 512b Sectors and Correctly Report 4k Sectors?

Question

I recently returned a Western Digital WD20EARS drive with 4k sectors (Western Digital refers to this as "advanced format"), because I found out that it lies and reports 512b sectors to the OS, and there's no way to disable this behavior (there's only a jumper to offset the LBA by one to align 512b sector 63 with a 4k sector).

Which drives on the market correctly report 4k sectors to the OS or have a jumper to do so? I'm not asking about an LBA offset jumper, like Western Digital uses, since the drive is still lies to the OS when it's set.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is a 4K native (4Kn) drive, to my knowledge there are no drives on the market at the moment that support this, either by default or through a jumper.

Stick with the 512B native sector drives for now and avoid the 512 emulation (512e) drives.

Answer 2

Perhaps by:

"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:"

And presumably that returned information similar to this to you:

Bytes per sector: 512 Bytes per cluster: 4096

Bytes per File Record Segment : 1024