Everything i'm reading basically says, thats hardware.
The hardware shows 512 to be compatible, even when its 4K
Yes, it can be considered a hardware setting that is configurable on many (but not all) NVMe SSDs.
With the 512 bytes setting, a 1 TB SSD may present itself to the operating system as having 1,953,125,000 logical sectors
With the 4096 bytes setting, the same SSD may instead present itself to the OS as having 244,140,625 logical sectors
In both cases the SSD may still internally use 4096 bytes physical sectors, but in the 512 bytes
logical sectors case (512e mode), there is a "translation process" in firmware that maps them to 4096 bytes sectors. This translation presumably decreases performance in a few ways, which is how setting the SSD to 4096 bytes sectors may improve it slightly.
Again, this is not directly related to NTFS cluster size.
As long as you use 4K, you get the proper performance - but if you use 512, it's emulated and has to load the whole 4K cluster to regardless
Yes, that's basically it.
Those posts you're showing are about esoteric file systems that needed to be changed to the 4K sizing, since they defaulted to lower values. Note how most are many years old, and usually not about NTFS?
Some of the posts I linked suggested that the 4K sizing may be incompatible with some applications or environment (e.g. VMware vSphere), others that the 4 KB setting (i.e. 4096 bytes per sector) has higher performance and should be used if available, which is what I wanted to highlight (i.e. higher performance but potential compatibility issues).
On my WD SN850 I set 4096 bytes per sector before installing Windows, and the command which gave the about output (fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x: ) reports this on it:
This is instead what it reports on a Crucial MX500 where the "Bytes Per Sector" setting (i.e. logical sector size) cannot be changed from its default 512 bytes size. I also formatted the NTFS partition to 64 kB cluster size, ("Bytes Per Cluster") which shows that the "Bytes Per Sector" property is independent of cluster size:
While outside my knowledge, this could also be one of the differences between MBR formatting and GPT formatting
No, this is not directly related to MBR/GPT. GPT formatting can still use 512 bytes per sector.
Both the SSDs installed in my system are GPT-formatted, but only the NVMe one has been set (by me) to 4096 bytes per sector.
