# You may want to replace 0 by your drive number. Make sure you check the serial number
# to not erase the one you didn' want.
nvme id-ns -H /dev/nvme0n1
Look at the last lines:
If it says:
LBA Format 0 : Metadata Size: 0 bytes - Data Size: 512 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best (in use)
Your disk only handles 512 bytes sectors.
If it says:
LBA Format 0 : Metadata Size: 0 bytes - Data Size: 512 bytes - Relative Performance: 0x2 Good (in use)
LBA Format 1 : Metadata Size: 0 bytes - Data Size: 4096 bytes - Relative Performance: 0x1 Better
It means your drive supports 4k sectors, but it is currently set to 512 bytes.
To set it to 4k. Careful, this will erase everything on your drive:
nvme format --lbaf=1 /dev/nvme0n1 # This will delete everything on that drive!
If it says that:
NVMe status: ACCESS_DENIED: Access to the namespace and/or LBA range is denied due to lack of access rights(0x4286)
It means it is locked. If you used the drive (partition, read or write), it is usually locked by its firmware. I was able to unlock it by just suspending the machine and waking it up, but I heard it doesn’t work all the time. You may want to reboot it may solve it as well.
I did see a 10% improvement on my ext4 really basic benchmarks. There is really little reason to keep it to 512 except for compatibility anyway the disk seems to use 4k internally.