I think you misunderstood that. Configuring your filesystem to use a specific sector size (or whatever term is used for various file systems) does not modify the disk firmware. I'm not seeing it anyway.
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.
My point is various drives are bad and causes issues not only with Windows, be it with some or all firmwares from the manufacturer. Among them the only specific drive mentioned in the article. If WD advertises this mode then it ought to work.
Absolutely but my point (or rather, guess) was that it's a separate issue from the one well-documented in that GitHub link as I don't think random Windows users are doing this reconfiguration and the GH link seems to only affect reconfigured drives.
