I just purchased 3 WD Black 1TB WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 drives from Best Buy. The specs show that they are SATA 6Gbps, 64MB cache drives. When I went to register the serial numbers on the WDC.com website, they show as WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN drives which are the WD Caviar Black drives with SATA 3Gbps and 32 MB cache specs.
The drives I purchased have a 5 year warranty. My main concern is that if one of these drives go bad, WDC will replace them with the WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN drives which have differnet specs as the ones I bought.
I contacted support making them aware of this, but the guy pretty much told me this:
“The serial number shows an old model number, but actually the Caviar Black and WD Black drives are the same drive, the name was changed to the latter. There are WD Black models with 3gbps 32 mb cache, but the model you own (WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0) has the specs you were looking for.”
What bothers me is that when I registered these drives online, they ALL show up as WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN drives which is not what I bought. I can’t be sure, but it appears to that if I have a problem with one of me drives, WDC will try to send me a replacement drive with the 3Gbps, 32MB cache specs (specs for a WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN drive which I don’t own)
I just wanted to post this to see if anyone else experienced something like this, or can shed some light on this.
Just another note, the new drives that I bought have the wrong serial/model sticker on the boxes label. They all show the correct serial numbers on the box label, but the model numbers on the label show WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN. They should show WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 as the model number because that’s what the drives actually are.