How can i tell sector size

When was the last time you really had to care about the geometry of a hard disk? Well, worry not! All file systems were made for that, and assumed that was how it was going to be. However, as hard drives grew in size, along with file size, that byte setting seemed a bit antiquated. When was the last time you created a file that was under a kilobyte in size? As drives get bigger, that means more and more sectors have to be tracked, which involves more and more overhead. When you start having millions, though, it starts to add up.

There are even more complicated problems involved with these small sectors, and the hard drive industry made an agreement way back in to move to 4K for sector size. Take this example from Seagate : six sectors 3K take up the same space as a single 4k sector due to overhead.

That means hard drives can be bigger without increasing areal density, great! For example, 8K sector size. If you try to use sector size that is higher than 4K, you will encounter the following error message:. Cannot use file 'data file path', because it is on a volume with sector size SQL Server supports a maximum sector size of bytes. Move the file to a volume with a compatible sector size.

You can use the following Windows OS commands to determine the physical sector sizes that are reported by the hardware:. SQL Server requires correct reporting of physical sector size to maintain data safety and avoid data loss.

Avoidance of sector rewrites is a fundamental requirement of SQL Server. We do not support the read, write, and modify behavior that logical sector size reporting causes. For more information about support for larger sector sizes, see the "4-KB disk sector sizes" section in the following white paper:. If you are using Advanced Format Disks that are physically formatted with 4, bytes, but expose a logical sector size of bytes, then you must update your SQL Server systems with the following fixes to be in a supported state:.

The disk drive manufacturer specification should indicate whether the drive is an Advanced Format Disk. After you apply the Windows updates, utilities such as fsutil start reporting both the physical and logical sector sizes.

If you use Advanced Format Disks without the updates that are mentioned earlier in this section, there is a risk of potential data loss and performance issues. There are even more complicated problems involved with these small sectors, and the hard drive industry made an agreement way back in to move to 4K for sector size. Take this example from Seagate : six sectors 3K take up the same space as a single 4k sector due to overhead. That means hard drives can be bigger without increasing areal density, great!

These 4K sectors sound like a good idea. Well, no…. The problem with all of this is that OSes have to modify their disk access patterns file systems to accommodate for this change from to 4K. The fundamental unit of storage has to be recognizable and changed, which is a lot of work under the covers to do really nothing but make a drive work the same way it always had been.

To combat this, the drive manufacturers introduced e sectors, which emulate byte sectors on top of the 4k structure that is actually on the disk.