But HDD vendors say 4kb native is more efficient or as a matter or fact any type of native formatting... that is, if your drive is native 512, that's what it is best for.
The link you've cited isn't arguing the merits of 4Kn vs. 512e, it's arguing that native 4KB sectors are better than native 512-byte sectors, as well as arguing for proper partition alignment.
I'm not disagreeing that reading/writing a 4KB physical sector on an AF drive is more efficient than reading/writing a 512-byte physical sector on a legacy drive, but that's missing the point. We're not discussing the difference between using a legacy drive vs. AF drive, we're talking only about using an AF drive, with Win7 vs. with Win8+. And there, assuming proper partition alignment, it makes no difference.
On an AF drive, it makes no difference if you're writing eight 512e sectors or one 4Kn sector--you're writing 4KB either way, and the underlying hardware is writing just once, to the same 4KB physical sector. Just because one may be using 512e, don't mistake that to mean there are eight writes. There is only one 4KB write, and the drive is writing exactly the same number of bits (including error correction and housekeeping) that it would if you were using 4Kn sectors. Indeed, the hardware can *only* write 4KB at a time; writing 512-bytes at a time is physically impossible.
It would be a different discussion if we were comparing native 512-byte sectors on a legacy drive vs. native 4KB sectors on an AF drive, but we're not. (If we were, AF wins because of more efficient overhead.) We're only talking about how to use an AF drive.
It would be different if we were talking about accessing a single block of 512 bytes from a legacy drive vs. from an AF drive, but we're not. (If we were, AF loses because it would have to read an entire 4KB sector before extracting the 512-byte piece.)
But NTFS does not access by sectors, it accesses by storage allocation units or "clusters", so 512-byte segments are never part of the equation. NTFS is always (assuming the default allocation unit size) accessing 4KB at a time, regardless of the underlying physical sector size. Whether one uses 512e or 4Kn, you're still reading a single physical sector and transferring the entire 4KB of data to the OS.
And, of course, it would be different if the partition is not properly aligned, but we've stipulated the partition must be properly aligned for the purposes of this discussion. It's more efficient if the 4KB of data the NTFS file system wants to write lines up with one 4KB physical sector instead of overlapping two sectors.
