In the newest entry in the official Windows 8 blog site, Microsoft's Bryan Matthew, one of the program managers on the Storage and File System team, writes about how Windows 8 will handle what the company calls 'very large capacity' disk. Here's an excerpt:

Designing for large sector disks
Learning from some issues identified with prior versions of Windows, AF disks have been a key design point for new features and technologies in Windows 8; as a result, Windows 8 is the first OS with full support for both types of AF disks – 512e and 4K Native.

To make this happen, we identified which features and technology areas were most vulnerable to the potential issues described above, and reached out to the teams developing those features to provide guidance and help them test hardware for these scenarios.

Issues we addressed included the following:
- Introduce new and enhance existing API to better enable applications to query for the physical sector size of a disk
- Enhancing large-sector awareness within the NTFS file system, including ensuring appropriate sector padding when performing extending writes (writing to the end of the file)
- Incorporating large-sector awareness in the new VHDx file format used by Hyper-V to fully support both types of AF disks
- Enhancing the Windows boot code to work correctly when booting from 4K native disks

This is just a small cross section of the amount of work done to enable across-the-board support for both types of AF disks in Windows 8. We are also working with other product teams within Microsoft and across the industry (e.g. database application developers) to ensure efficient and correct behavior with AF disks.