I am trying to format a brand new 1TB Western Digital blue mechanical hard drive using Windows 7 Disk Management. It is not giving me the option to select an allocation unit size less than 4096 bytes, but on the two other mechanical hard drives that I just formatted (500 GB and 750 GB), it gave me the option to select greater than or equal to 512 bytes. Is there something about the 1 TB size that prevents me from selecting less than 4096 bytes for allocation unit size?
Thank you.
It's a requirement for drives larger than 2TB but as far as 1TB goes, it's not a strict requirement. This is due to a number of factors including MSDOS/MBR versus GPT. Do you have a specific reason to use 512 byte sectors?
Anyway, Linux to the rescue, just boot the GParted LiveCD and format the drive that way.
You'll want to delete the drive's existing partition table, create a MSDOS partition table and then create your partitions. You'll want NTFS partitions for Windows.
