How to fix "512 bytes per sector" to "4096 bytes per sector" for an "Advanced Format" 4K sector USB hard drive? Mac OS X 10.7.4 has a Sharkoon Quickdeck Pro USB enclosure attached. That USB enclosure contains a 4TB Advanced Format hard drive which has 4096 bytes (4K) sector size. The drive is GPT/GUID partitioned.

When listing the properties os the drive, it is being seen as "512 bytes per sector":

$ diskutil info W | grep -E 'Total Size:|Volume Free Space:|Device Block Size:'
   Total Size:               4.0 TB (4000787022336 Bytes) (exactly 7814037153 512-Byte-Blocks)
   Volume Free Space:        4.0 TB (4000772390912 Bytes) (exactly 7814008576 512-Byte-Blocks)
   Device Block Size:        512 Bytes


Or when formatting the disk with newfs_hfs the drive is being seen as "512b sector size".

$ sudo newfs_hfs -N -J /dev/disk3s1
7814037153 sectors (512 bytes per sector)
HFS Plus format parameters:
    volume name: "untitled"
    block-size: 8192
    total blocks: 488377322
    journal-size: 311296k
    first free catalog node id: 16
    catalog b-tree node size: 8192
    initial catalog file size: 354418688
    extents b-tree node size: 4096
    initial extents file size: 16777216
    attributes b-tree node size: 8192
    initial attributes file size: 354418688
    initial allocation file size: 61054976 (7453 blocks)
    data fork clump size: 65536
    resource fork clump size: 65536


How to make/force OS X to recognize Advanced Format 4K sector size drives as 4096 bytes per sector using command line tools

or

which USB drive/enclosure natively supports 4K sectors on OS X?

PS When reading the source code of newfs_hfs the sectorSize value seems to be derived from this function call ioctl(fso, DKIOCBLKSIZE, &amp;dip.sectorSize)
I had this same issue.  I finally resolved it by connecting to the drive using eSATA instead of USB or Firewire.  My USB/FW enclosure has an eSATA port on the back, and I connected to that instead of USB.  Bypassing the USB circuit in the external enclosure allowed Mac Disk Utility to directly recognize the WD30EZRX 3.0 TB drive, and to partition it correctly to that size.

Luckily I have an older Macbook Pro with and Express/34 slot and an eSATA adapter for that.  I don't know how we are going fix this with newer MacBooks.  Perhaps newer USB interfaces can correctly represent the Advanced Format sector info.