Is it possible to set the logical sector size of a USB HDD?

Question

I have two supposedly identical 3TB Western Digital USB HDDs. One contains nearly the full 3TB of data. I want the other to be a backup of that data. There are lots of small files, so running cp would be even slower than copying 3TB over USB using dd. Both drivers were bought at the same time, both use msdos partition table, but one shows logical/physical sector sizes of 4096/4096 and the other shows 512/4096.

My problem is that I'm trying to copy to the 512/4096 drive, but I can't create a large enough partition because of the limits of the msdos partition table with 512 byte (logical) sectors. I've tried various commands (dd of the first few sectors to partition table, parted, fdisk, gparted, Windows XP "Manage" and Windows 7 "Manage") but end up with either 2TB max limits or ~300GB partitions that thought they were 3TB when they were created.

Given that one of my drives is running at 4096/4096 then this question doesn't hold true for my case.

Using GPT is my fall-back option, but it creates a partition that is slightly smaller than the NTFS partition, so I wouldn't be able to just dd the filesystem on the partition.

Is there a way to force 4096/4096 for an msdos partition table (either from Linux or Windows) so that I can create a 3TB partition that perfectly matches my source disk?

Answer 1

I just had a similar issue. I had a Seagate 3TB USB Desktop Expansion drive that I wanted to move into my PC for faster access (I only had USB 2.0 on the PC). Once I did that I couldn't access the filesystem. Returning it to the USB to SATA controller made it work again. Comparing the two I found that in the external case (using the USB to SATA controller) the drive had 4096/4096 logical/physical sector sizes and when connected to the internal motherboard SATA, it had 512/4096 logical/physical sector sizes. Much like the OP sugguests, a 4096 logical sector size allows for > 2TiB partitions, but at the 512 sector size we get the 2TiB limit. I didn't want to copy stuff off (slowly over USB) to somewhere, repartition (GPT), reformat, and copy back, so I kept at it. My ultimate solution was to:

Use gdisk (GPT version of fdisk) to make delete and remake the partition spanning the exact same area (using 512 byte sectors0 as the original MBR partition table (which has 4k sectors). This basically amounted to taking the sectors for start/end of the partition in 4K-land and multiplying by 8. I did have an off-by one on the end, so I added 8 more there and so far so good (e2fsck alerted me to that.) The e2fsk is still going, so I'm not 100% sure I'm safe, but it seems all good in theory and I did mount the files for a bit and they looked fine. Note: I imagine it's obvious I'm running Linux...