Nice, thank you.

OP was asking how to switch between 512 byte sectors and 4096 byte sectors. A low level format is how to do that. It’s triggered by the sg_format tool on Linux, or by a tool provided by the drive manufacturer.

Low level formating is how the data tracks are layed out on the disk platters, it’s what the drive firmware sees. hdparm and sg_format instruct the disk to rearrange those tracks. High-level formatting is what the OS sees when you run mkfs. It creates a new file system or replaces an existing one.

Use sg_format to run a low level format on the disk. 512E vs 4kN isn’t going to change much in a homelab environment. If you create a filesystem with 4k clusters, Linux will send 4k wrudte blocks to the disk. The firmware on the disk will write that out into 8 logical disk sectors, usually in a single 4k physical sector. I use my storage mainly for media and there’s no performance difference between my 512E disks and my 4nN disks. I simply don’t have an intense and sensitive enough environment to show the performance gain. I’d say leave the low level formating alone and just write a filesystem on top of it with 4k blocks.