Changing sector size on Samsung 840 SSDs

Solution 1:

I don't think you can "tune" the sector size of your drive. Intel only provides a way to switch between the very small "legacy" 512 bytes sector size and the "new industry standard" of 4096 bytes per sector. This is probably only for people having compatibility or performance issues with the new size.

Indeed, nowadays, several filesystems can use a 4 kB fs block size.

So, what you can sometimes do, is to use a customized filesystem block size value. You may want to try 8 kB here, if possible. You may only be able to choose this at formatting time.

Even if you can't, you may be able to tweak other fs parameters which could help. The ext4 filesystem, for example, only handles 1, 2 and 4 kB blocks but can use the stride and stripe_width parameters to change it's behavior in a way that could improve performance on SSDs or RAID arrays.

Note that making things worse by tweaking default parameters without a good understanding of the way things work is easy. I suggest you test performance of different configuration.