4K sector drives not compatible on MSI P35 Neo2-FR motherboard

Few days ago I have purchased a HDD. I have the connected to the SATA connector of my MSI P35 Neo2-Fr motherboard. The drive has a capacity of nearly 500GB and the BIOS showing all the storage as it is. The system now booted in Windows 7. I went to take a look into Device Manager to know how the drive is detected over there. Surprisingly there it shows as Volume0 and disk management showing it as a 460GB HDD.

I don’t have any other SATA connectors to check this drive. At first I could able to find a cause because all my motherboard components drivers were up to date. So once again I go through the specs of HDD. It was actually a 4K sector drive and I assume that the issue is due to this reason. What can I do now? Is there any solution?

There are few limitation about the 4k drive. Now a day’s most of the drives are not 4k. if you are Windows XP user, it will not automatically align writes on 4k drives and due to this you will surely get a great deal of performance issue. If you have got a WD HDD, there is a good utility called Advanced Format Align Utility which is specifically meant for these 4k drives. I assume that other manufacture will also start developing their own tools for managing 4k drives. XP users have to run a utility to use 4k drives with a clean install. If it is a WD 4k drove, then you don’t need to run any utility because it is already stock-aligned. In Windows 7 also you should use a align utility. If there is no utility, then Windows clone software vendors should have to develop one.

I don’t think that the issue is about the motherboard. it looks like the limitation of Windows 7 which would not able to handle or align a 4k drive. I have heard that only Linux distributions are capable to change in size of physical sectors on these drives and they have been doing it for a long time. The block layer was written like to avoid the hardwired sector sizes. Sector counts and offsets will be managed as 512-byte kernel level. Block layer has to be careful perform I/O in units.

As far as I know that all Windows vista, Windows 7, Mac OS and Linux support 4k sector drives very well but sometime users won’t notice any change. Only XP users have to be more careful about the performance issue with these drives. If you are a XP user, you should avoid the installation of 4k drives. If your computer has previously came with Factory installed Windows XP, then you don’t need to worry about the drives since they will be fine in any manner.

If you are going to install later, it will be problem for you. Due to its error rate specification, it has created some big problems because it has not tightened. Home users might not aware about the problem with these drives and what is causing the problem. The Oss and files systems need to account these problems and should deal with it automatically.

I have seen this issue only in Windows OS. The users who have installed the 4k drives on Linux machine, didn’t report any such problems. The actual problem is not about the motherboard connector or BIOS, it is the OS which is not able to access the disk in 512Byte instead of 4KB. Usually you can see this problem only in drives which are 2TB and smaller. Because the 4K drives reporting as 512Byte drives to the system. If you use drives above 3TB, they will report as 4K sector drives.