How can I determine the sector size on an external hard drive?

Posted by sigint on Super User See other posts from Super User or by sigint
Published on 2010-03-17T00:12:18Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 1:11 UTC
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hard-drive

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Windows

Hard drives are transitioning from 512 byte to 4096 byte sector sizes, and it looks like Windows XP won't support these newer drives without additional software (such as WDalign from Western Digital)

My question is: how does this affect external hard drives? I'll be buying a 1TB USB external drive, and it'll be plugged into a mix of Windows 7 and XP machines. Is there an easy way to tell what the sector size on an external hard drive is?

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