ATA8 std. allows reporting sector size/alignment (Score 1)

There is also the ability to "free" unused blocks (with CFA commands at least), maybe so they can be erased in the background, or freed from wear-leveling tracking. There is a commercial device-mapper plugin to force large physical sectors on devices that still use 512 byte logical sectors. Not much different than md-raid devices whose stripe width or stride is much like a large physical sector.