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For some reason I decided to spontaneously buy a new hard drive that is not of the same model of the main drive and so I mirrored it. Unfortunately the following error message came up in the Windows 7 Virtual Disk Manager:

All disks holding extends for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid.

After some check up I see that my disks have the following stats:

Main drive: SAMSUNG HD103SI, physical sector size 512b.
Mirror drive: WDC WD10EARX, physical sector size 4096b.

Running chkdsk they both report 4096 bytes in each "allocation unit", which I assume is another way to say "virtual sector size".

Do the physical sector sizes have to match? Can I somehow reformat a drive to match the other? It'd be nice if I could use different drives, then I could step-wise upgrade in the future.

I was thinking that I could clone my main drive to my mirror drive and then use the main drive as a mirror instead. Would that work, or it would just be a huge waste of time?

EDIT: i noticed that i can create a mirrored volume on both drives from 2 unallocated drives. but when i create a volume first, right click it and then try the option "add mirror" it always gives the "sector size error" message to me. is this a bug? why doesnt "add mirror" work :(

anyways assusming that ill have to reinstall windows 7 on them (god jesus i mustve reinstalled windows like 15 times in my life now) im going to follow this guide here and well see how it goes: http://my.opera.com/Devocalypse/blog/2011/03/02/install-windows-7-on-a-dynamic-disk-pro-and-ultimate-only

EDIT: it works. managed to install a fresh working bootable windows on the "mirrored volume" by following the guide. however im not satisfied. i still want to copy/clone my current "main volume" to the dynamic disk, which would be easy if the god damn "add mirror" button would work.

EDIT: Bought another identical disk this time and now the "Add Mirror" button works. I clone the data onto the new disk then boot from there then i press "Add mirror" and voila it works. Now im trying to figure out why the other mirrored drive wont boot... Jesus they dont make it easy for you.

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The "allocation unit" is the cluster size for NTFS. Functionally, I think it's the same as what you mean by "virtual sector size"... it's what the filesystem is using as the minimum allocation size. You won't be able to reformat one to match the other, but cloning should work if your disks are well supported. I'm surprised at the limitation... no idea how to fix it. – mgjk Dec 13 '11 at 13:35
Thanks for your comment. Sad :( i thought so. Oh well hopefully someone else benefit from this post. – ColacX Dec 13 '11 at 21:03
so i decided to do the next best thing. i cloned the drive (with EASEUS partion manager free home edition, copy dynamic disc volume to basic-drive) and soon ill buy a new drive and mirror it.i got the clone to boot and run but its running oddly slow/spiky and for some reason chkdsk cant get to stage 1 it just freezes on stage 0, anyone know why??? im going to try rebooting a few times. – ColacX Dec 16 '11 at 20:16
oh sweet i restarted the computer once and windows 7 said driver installed for new drive and you must reboot, i did and chkdsk works perfectly now. i guess it couldnt figure out which driver to use on the first boot. – ColacX Dec 16 '11 at 20:32
crap i bought a seagate ST2000DL003 which should have the same sector size, they both should be advanced format too. and i still get the same error. im thinking that i need to reinstall windows but i dont really want to (mostly for my curiosity). not sure that the drive brands / models should not work with each other anyone that can share some light on this? – ColacX Dec 20 '11 at 18:20
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