Can a Western Digital hard drive really look this bad?

I bought a hard drive, which is second hand and thought it might be counterfeit just from the way the plastic looked on the outside of it. I tried to do some research, but when I found a photo of the same drive for sale brand new, it also looked terrible. See the photo here - and this is from a reputable website. My drive looks the same as this.

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The hard drive is a WD Blue 3.5" ATA WD3200AAJB. Compared to other old hard drives I have which are lying around (Maxtor, and Seagate) this one feels a lot lighter, but then those other hard drives are about 6 or 8 years old. I have checked some of the codes on the hard drive to see if they correspond to similar codes on the underside of the hard drive, but in truth I don’t know exactly how to tell a fake from a legit one.

I am amazed at how badly they seem to be put together. I mean the plastic doesn’t bother me if the drive works OK, but it looks like something you might buy from China.

Hi the drive looks fine to me and yes of course older drives did weigh more newer technology means lighter. This is a example of a chinese hard drive LOL.  http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html  so if shows 320 gig your fine

Thanks. Your link is a terrible story, but there are some convincing copies of WD hard drives I have seen while Googling. From info on other sites, there are usually icons missing on the sticker on the front, or some codes don’tmatch on the PCB and stickers. By the way, was my photo not allowed. Why was it removed?

I have a older drive the exact same as that I don’t use anymore it looks the same. As for the picture don’t quote me on this but it may be that you used a picture from a web site without there permission so what you should have done is post a link to the picture no copyrite is in the forum rules But of course it may have been too big or what ever. As for the story if you want to buy the cheapest from just anywhere your looking for trouble so yes I thought it was funny also.

I can’t see your photo, but here are several threads which should give you a few things to look out for:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/Is-this-a-genuine-or-fake-WD-drive/td-p/224428
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/WD20EARS-00MVWB0-and-AAM-option-Supported-and-Not-Supported/m-p/226958#M6398
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/A-faked-wd2003FYYS/m-p/56258#M2698