How can I determine the sector size in windows?

Question

How can I determine the Physical Sector Size (e.g. if i have an Advanced Format drive with 4,096 byte sectors rather than the legacy 512 byte sectors) in Wi

Answer 1

i wanted to expand on Chris Gessler's answer, and note that there is no known way to get the Physical sector of a drive using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), e.g. wmic.

Given that i have an Advanced Format drive (i.e. it uses 4,096 bytes per sector rather than 512):

C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo d:
NTFS Volume Serial Number :       0xa016d8a616d87eaa
Version :                         3.1
Number Sectors :                  0x00000000747057ff
Total Clusters :                  0x000000000e8e0aff
Free Clusters  :                  0x000000000e7b2813
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000000
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :       4096

Neither WMI's DiskDrive:

wmic:root\cli>diskdrive
Availability  BytesPerSector  Capabilities  CapabilityDescriptions                                       Caption
              512             {3, 4, 10}    {"Random Access", "Supports Writing", "SMART Notification"}  ST1000DM003-9YN162 ATA Device

nor Partition:

wmic:root\cli>partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index
BlockSize  Index  Name                   StartingOffset
512        0      Disk #0, Partition #0  1048576

can report the underlying physical sector size. It makes sense when you realize they both report the sector size that Windows is using. It is 512 bytes per sector - the drive just happens to be different inside.

That's because only Windows 8 supports use of 4k sectors. Windows 7 understands that the drive might be 4k, and works to align it's 4k Clusters with the hard-drive's underlying 4k Sectors.

Answer 2

Powershell:

$wql = "SELECT Label, Blocksize, Name FROM Win32_Volume WHERE FileSystem='NTFS'"
Get-WmiObject -Query $wql -ComputerName '.' | Select-Object Label, Blocksize, Name

Output example:

Label            Blocksize Name
-----            --------- ----
OSDisk                4096 C:\
Windows RE Tools      4096 \\?\Volume{b042c778-cd66-4381-9312-3f4311321675}\
PS C:\>