WD support got back to me about this issue and told me to return the drive.
I will, but in the meantime I bought another Caviar Black 1TB to check…and guess what…the “Hardware ECC Recovered” status field is not shown in SMART!!!
Here’s the screenshot of the 2nd unit SMART readout:
What the hell…
Physically the two drives look different too. The first unit had a white sticker over the usual jumper settings diagram. It also had a different looking PCB and some odd sticker on the side…
I wonder if the first unit I received is some kind of test unit that got out. Poooor control.
