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Intel 540s 1TB SSD reporting 512 BPS and BPPS rather than 4,096

RAbra1
New Contributor

I installed a new Intel 540s 1TB SSD into a new Dell OptiPlex 3040. It is the only drive in the PC. The drive had firmware LSBG200 on it when I received it, but I updated it to the latest firmware (036C) immediately. I installed Windows 10 Pro x64 on it using the latest installation media publicly available from Microsoft's site.

The command "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:" reports "Bytes Per Sector: 512" and "Bytes Per Physical Sector: 512." I guess I am surprised to see it reporting 512. I would think it would be showing 4,096 for both of those values.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

8 REPLIES 8

IIanM
New Contributor II

For consumer hard drives, the Logical Sector Size is set to 512 for compatibility, since most consumer PCs(to be exact, their crappy motherboard and SATA controller) don't support 4Kn. 4Kn means 4K native, where 4KB Logical sector size is used instead of 512 bytes.

If you really need a 4Kn drive, buy a data center drive. Data center drives usually provide a tool for you to change the default logical sector size to anything like 4096.

For more information about Intel Data Center SSDs that support 4Kn, see the product specification page.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hello Ralph3,

About the sector size in your SSD 540s (Consumer drive) those drives come with 512 physical sector size. As the previous user mentioned, the 4k physical sector size is natively for Data Center SSDs, you can check those models in http://ark.intel.com/ this link (Click on Solid State Drives and then Data Center SSDs).The tool to make the SSD change the sector size is the https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26575/Intel-SSD-Data-Center-Tool Intel® Data Center Tool, this http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/solid-state-drives/000006392.html article can help you in case you get one of our Data Center SSDs.Regards,Nestor C

RAbra1
New Contributor

Thank you both for the replies.

Nestor if I may follow up with one more question that you might be able to help me with...

In the Intel SSD 540s product spec sheet in the chart on page 24 which talks about "the sector data returned from an identify device command," it indicates that for word "106" the default value is "4000h." I assume that "4000h" refers to 4000 hexadecimal, which equates to 16,384 in decimal. This entry in the chart is described as being the "Physical sector size / logical sector size."

Given that this drive has a physical sector size of 512 bytes, not 16,384 bytes, can you help me understand what the default value of "4000h" shown in the chart on page 24 is actually referring to? The description above the chart indicates that these default values are what would be returned in response to an "identify device command." But that begs the questions, why does my drive report that it's 512? And since it is 512, why would the drive return 16,384 when queried (mine doesn't, of course), if in fact this is what the chart in the product sheet is indicating?

Thanks again for your help.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hi Ralph3,

We would like to get further information about this request, we will engage additional resources and we will reply back here.Regards,Nestor C