No, that is one thing you can do (in zfs this is just setting the recordsize property) but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about reflashing to have the firmware present logical 4k sectors instead of logical 512b sectors. Theoretically this boosts throughput and while it would technically increase latency (you'd have to rewrite a bigger sector for any change) in practice these drives all have physical sectors actually larger than 4k so this isn't an issue. It isn't a full firmware flash but it's a low-level reconfiguration of the firmware (independent of filesystem sector size), and it seems there are bugs in this mode.
https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/20968/~...