What's in the box?

I’m trying to decide whether to buy a My Book or a third-party enclosure and a WD bare drive.  Can anyone tell me which WD drives are in the following products?

My Book Essential 1 TB

My Book Essential 2 TB

My Book Essential 1.5 TB (not on WD site but at Newegg)

My Book Studio II 2 TB

WD doesn’t give that information for some reason, so without opening the case is not possible to know.

Alucardx23 wrote:

WD doesn’t give that information for some reason, so without opening the case is not possible to know.

That’s why I asked here (in addition to opening a ticket with WD support – which has had no response).  I thought that it was possible that some user(s) had opened the case of one or more of these products (after the warranty had expired … or not) and had looked inside.

I suppose one reason for the official silence is that WD may use whatever model drive they happen to have the most of at any particular time – sometimes using a Caviar Green drive, other times using something else.

In addition to any potential reliability differences between different WD drive types, there is also the question of whether a particular drive uses 4K Logical Sectors, which will not work with system images created by Windows 7 backup (although there is a WD fix for that:  http://tinyurl.com/bvgwzzx).  But maybe only WD drives > 2.5 TB use 4K logical sectors, so that’s not a problem for the 1 and 2 TB products.