I think that's the second-gen WD Black, but the first one that had their in-house SSD controller rather than a third-party controller. The marketing and packaging didn't prominently use a more specific model number to distinguish it from the previous WD Black, but on the drive's label it does say "PC SN700". Also, the first-gen WD Black was 256GB and 512GB capacities, while the later generations are 250/500/1000/2000GB. Firmware version strings for the first-gen WD Black were stuff like "B35200WD", while the SN700/720/730/750 family have versions like "102000WD" and "111110WD". So I would definitely expect your drive to require the sleep-wake cycle before it'll let you reformat to 4k sectors.

You seem to have a lot of info on this topic. Do you run a blog or some other way you disseminate this stuff?

I'm at https://www.anandtech.com/Author/182

But this thread gets into details that are more esoteric than what I cover in most reviews, which are written with a more Windows-oriented audience in mind. Since I do most of my testing on Linux and have an excess of SSDs littering my office, I'm well-equipped to participate in a thread like this.

I highly recommend reddit.com/r/NewMaxx as the clearinghouse for consumer SSD news and Q&A. I'm not aware of a similarly comprehensive forum for enterprise storage, where this thread would probably be a better fit.