Let be a disk with the following characteristics :
- bytes per sector = 512
- sectors per track = 50
- tracks per surface = 2000
- number of platters = 5
- average rotational speed =5400 rpm
- average seek time = 10 ms
Are 256, 2048 and 51 200 example of valid block size ?
I don't know much about block size but I think 256 < 512 might be too small to be a valid block size according to this picture :
sectors size is 512 and some new drives have 4096.
Normally the block size is determined by the file system and not the characteristics of the disk.
NTFS is nearly always 4k by default.
FAT16 was limited to 32k therefore 2gb max.
FAT32 was artificial limited, regarding the total number of blocks, because otherwise the FAT table would grow too large to hold in memory.
Almost all system offer similar option which are all powers of 2.
512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384,32768,65536
Numbers larger than 65k or smaller than 512 bytes are considered too large or small to be practical or efficient.
