How to Change Drive Sector Size Using Hugo Tool – HGST or Western Digital

A quick guide on modifying drive sector sizes from 512 bytes to 4K (or vice versa) using Western Digital’s Hugo utility.

What it does: This process allows you to reformat a drive to change its sector size, which can be useful for optimizing drive performance and compatibility in certain scenarios.

⚠️ Important: This is a low-level disk operation that will erase all data on the drive. Always back up your data before proceeding.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. Install Hugo from the WD PC-3000 Support Downloads section
2. Launch Command Prompt as Administrator (Ctrl+Shift+Click)
3. Navigate to Hugo directory:

cd c:\Program Files\WDC\HUGO\bin\

4. Verify device visibility:

hugo s --device

5. Format the drive with new sector size:

hugo format -g \\.\PhysicalDrive -b 4096 --fastformat

6. Verify the changes using either:

fsutil fsinfo sectorInfo D:
or

powershell -Command "Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, PhysicalSectorSize, LogicalSectorSize"

After completion, your drive should be configured with the new sector size and ready for use.