I’m the owner of several WD1001FALS drives, all have a -00XXXX suffix and were purchased in the last couple months at a Best Buy in Michigan. So far, they have been great HDDs…
Last week, however, I bought another one and saw some very strange behavior while I was doing my standard initial “qualification” testing – in particular the Hardware_ECC_Recovered (SMART attribute 195) normalized value had dropped to 001 after several hours of r/w testing. In brief, exactly the same symptoms reported in this thread. I also found this Best Buy review which is describing the same issue… As others have reported, the drive has a white sticker obscuring the jumper setting instructions on the drive label.
After realizing lots of people thought this might be an OEM drive I did some further searching that revealed it was apparently manufactured for Apple computer. Do a Google search on “40U9B0” and you’ll see multiple hits on people discussing this drive as the OEM drive for 27" Apple iMacs made in late 2009.
On Thursday I reported this problem to WDC Teir 2 technical support. They seemed to take the report seriiously and requested photographs of the drive and its retail packaging. I provided these along with Linux ‘smartcltl’ output.
It would really surprise me if WDC had intentionally dumped OEM drives with random custom firmware into their retail channels. Hopefully they’ll get to the bottom of this issue…
For reference, here’s an image of the odd-ball -40U9B0 “retail” drive:
