On 24 July 2012 16:56, Toby Corkindale <toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
On 24/07/12 16:51, Colin Fee wrote:
> A colleague has asked if there is any utility, application, or command
> to show a disks physical block size. He's particularly interested in
> interrogating a drive to see if it's an Advanced Format drive i.e. with
> native 4096 byte sectors or 512e sectors etc.

hdparm -I /dev/sda

Hmmmmm.  On my laptop here that command produces the following:

Configuration:
        Logical         max     current
        cylinders       16383   16383
        heads           16      16
        sectors/track   63      63
        --
        CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
        LBA    user addressable sectors:  268435455
        LBA48  user addressable sectors:  976773168
        Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
        Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
        Logical Sector-0 offset:                  0 bytes
        device size with M = 1024*1024:      476940 MBytes
        device size with M = 1000*1000:      500107 MBytes (500 GB)
        cache/buffer size  = 16384 KBytes
        Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 7200

Yet a look at the spec sheet from seagate shows, for all drives in this family,:

Bytes per sector = 512




--
Colin Fee
tfeccles@gmail.com