Supported Sector Sizes

Contemporary hard drives and SSDs ship with a 4096-byte physical sector size. Most also support the 512-byte logical sector size. (These drives are often labeled 512e for "512-Byte Sector Size Emulation".) SPX supports backing up and restoring both 4096- and 512-byte logical sector sizes.

In the unusual situation of restoring a partition/volume from one logical sector size to another:

• 512 bytes per logical sector -> 4096 bytes per logical sector
• 4096 bytes per logical sector -> 512 bytes per logical sector

SPX will issue an error message during the restore if it encounters a mis-matched sector size.

Note that a second type of 4K drives now appear on the market. These 4K Native (4Kn) drives do not support emulating the 512-byte logical sector size. Microsoft Windows may also issue a warning when restoring volumes from a 512-byte sector size drive to a 4Kn drive. Various Windows applications are hard-coded for 512-byte sectors and cannot re-initialize after migrating to a 4Kn drive.