TLDR The physical sector size of your storage device likely isn’t causing your Star Citizen installation to fail. People saying that they changed the sector size and the installation started to work are likely benefiting from some other thing. EG: they had a bad disk sector and swapping to 4k allowed them to skip that sector. These people will likely run into increased fragmentation and reduced drive lifespan. You should always keep your OS and drivers up to date. CIG has documented installer related issues extremely well in their KBs. If you can’t find your solution in the knowledge base, take to spectrum, but do not blindly follow advice, always make sure to do your research. ---- Recently there have been many instance of players having issues with the download and installation of Star Citizen, one of the common ‘solutions’ to the issue is to add the registry key: ForcedPhysicalSectorSizeInBytes with a value of 4096. This was a potential solution included in STARC-21248. I can’t stress enough DO NOT DO THIS. (unless you know exactly what you’re doing) Background: Back in the stone ages where computer storage was primarily spinning disks (HDD), platters were made with a physical sector size of 512 bytes, this was a number that could never be changes. And operating systems (up to windows 10) were specifically coded to work with this sector size with their filesystem (FAT, FAT32, and NTFS). As the demand for greater and greater storage sizes increased so did the need for a larger sector size to accommodate, as 4TB HDD with a 512b sector size greatly under performed. The resolution to this was for disk manufacturers to increase the base sector size of a disk to 4k. The issue with this was that all filesystems were still coded to use the 512b offset. . . . so came the creation of what we know today as 512e disk, or 512 emulated disks, a disk that had a 4k physical sector size but a 512 logical sector size eg: C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo d: LogicalBytesPerSector : 512 PhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 4096 PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance : 4096 FileSystemEffectivePhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 4096 Device Alignment : Aligned (0x000) Partition alignment on device : Aligned (0x000) Performs Normal Seeks Trim Not Supported Not DAX capable Not Thinly-Provisioned C:\Windows\system32> ^ This is my 2TB archive disk, notice the 512 logical sector and the 4096 physical sector. 512e disks are by far the most common disk you’ll find (as a consumer) these days. More recently manufacturers have started to make 4k native drives, these are drives that have a 4k logical sector size as well as a 4k physical sector drive, there are still pretty rare in the HDD space, but modern filesystems support them just fine. Issues start to arise in the OS / filesystem space when drives exceed a 4k physical sector size, think 8k sectors for instance. In a situation where you have an 8k sector disk, and you have a program that interact directly with the block storage of a disk, databases or iSCSI for instance, you may see an issue where the sector size of the disk isn’t supported by the program, in this situation, AND ONLY IN THIS SITUATION, should you force windows to a 4k physical sector size. So how come people are recommending this as a fix then? When windows 11 was first released there was a bug in the windows native NVME driver that caused issues in this space for some software installations to which it was necessary to manually set the physical block size of your device. This has since been fixed, and this is no longer necessary. As a consumer, there will likely never be an instance where you need to play with this setting nor should you. By default Most NVME devices will be delivered and installed as native 512 (512n). C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo \c: LogicalBytesPerSector : 512 PhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 512 PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance : 512 FileSystemEffectivePhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 512 Device Alignment : Aligned (0x000) Partition alignment on device : Aligned (0x000) No Seek Penalty Trim Supported Not DAX capable Not Thinly-Provisioned ^ This is my Samsung 980 pro, notice the 512 logical and physical sector size. The benefit with this setup is that it’s more widely supported by operating systems and filesystem. One of the benefits of NVME and Solid state is that this physical sector size is no longer ‘physical’ in the sense that it was with HDD we do have the ability to change this though firmware and some driver instance to meet our needs if you so choose, but you should never change it after you’ve already started laying software or data down on the device, as it could cause what’s known as misalignment. Misalignment is when you have a logical block of data spanning 2 physical blocks of storage. When misalignment occurs if causes the SSD to perform what’s called a ‘read-modify-write’ this is when the drive needs to read the entire sector, modify the data in the drivers local memory and then write it back to the sector, this causes unnecessary strain on the SSD and can shorten it’s lifespan, as well as present as performance issues. This will most commonly occur when you restore a backup from a spinning disk to a Solid State disk or NVME device. References: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/admin/troubleshoot-os-4kb-disk-sector-size https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/support-policy-4k-sector-hard-drives https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042417374-Star-Citizen-Minimum-System-Requirements https://www.stellarinfo.com/article/what-is-4k-hard-drive.php?cjevent=2fa2dc65775011ed8102001e0a1c0e0e&cjdata=MXxOfDB8WXww https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/kb982018-and-bytes-per-physical-sector/1557656b-49e4-4919-976b-321c01e5bbc3#:~:text=Bytes%20Per%20Sector%20%3A%20512%20Bytes%20Per%20Physical,%3A%204096%20Bytes%20Per%20FileRecord%20Segment%20%3A%201024 https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/setting-4k-sector-size-on-nvme-ssds-does-performance-actually-change.289757/#:~:text=Not%20all%20NVMe%20SSDs%20have%20this%20capability.%20Most,512%20byes%2Fsector%2C%20internally%20the%20firmware%20uses%204096%20bytes%2Fsector. https://www.ubackup.com/features/partition-alignment.html#:~:text=Below%20are%20the%20steps%3A%201%20Step%201.%20Press,by%204096%2C%20the%20partition%20is%20correctly%20aligned.%20 https://superuser.com/questions/982680/whats-the-point-of-hard-drives-reporting-their-physical-sector-size