> Just a passing note: IIRC, 8K sector size doesn’t work on Linux either.
Please note that Linux block layer does not have hardwired sector sizes. Although sector counts and offsets are indeed managed in terms of 512-byte units , the block layer performs the actual I/O in units of the the size that you have specified - sector size is a parameter to the disk’s request queue, rather than the disk itself. Therefore, sectors of the sizes other than 512 bytes will work just fine as long as you are careful enough to remember to make a proper translation - as I have said already, you will be getting the requests that are presented in terms of 512 byte units. However, in practical terms, it would be quite unwise for you to try “non-standard” sector sizes. More on it below
I seem to remember an extensive rant by Linus Penguin Pants on this topic, and how 8K
sectors were “stupid” or evil or something.
Don’t forget that kernel is not the first one to access the disk - it has to be loaded by someone. Even if your driver works fine with “non-standard” sector size , the rest of the world, including both BIOSes and bootloaders, is normally not prepared to deal with anything other than 512-byte sectors.
To make things even worse, in order to make it work the kernel has to align all transfers on 8K boundaries from the beginning of the partition. However, if the partition itself is not properly aligned, your 8K block will overlap two physical sectors. Taking into consideration that, for the historical reasons, misaligned partition is a norm, rather than exception, it does not really seem to be an optimal outcome, don’t you think. Certainly,
you can format the disk the way you wish, but, by doing so, you will make it Linux-specific -AFAIK, Windows is just not going to work with partitions that are “properly” aligned for 8K sectors, so that you can forget about dual-booting…
In other words, it looks like he had made a good point - I don’t know why you call it “rant”. I hope that my post also explains to the OP why the whole idea of 8K sectors is particularly stupid in the Windows
world …
Anton Bassov