512 vs 4k - why convert?

[Diavuno]

hey, like most here Im pretty technical... but why would you want to format your drives to or from 4k instead of 512?

I thought we only went to 4k for max amount of data in a certain number of addressable sectors... but is there another reason?

 

[ajs]

4k is now the native sector size on most storage devices. I'm sure there are many reasons, but this is a big one... operating on 512b boundaries allows for sub-optimal alignments which can hurt performance causing rmw on unaligned sector writes. This is especially true for SSDs.

 

[i386]

• 4 KByte is is using space more efficient (100 Byte ecc per 4096 Byte data vs. 50 Byte per 512 Byte)
• native 4k devices don't need to map 512 to the actual 4k sector in firmware
• 4 KByte is the standard block size for most general purpose filesystems
• allows larger storage devices