what does PC HA500 or SC HA500 mean in western digital hard drives(trying to spot new vs refurbished hdd)?

[Master]

hello everyone, hope you are doing well.
I recently bought a WD blue 4TB HDD, but I noticed the label information was off, it had purple specs on a blue HDD!
I returned it but wanted to also educate myself more on a few things, one of which is the code PC HA500 / SC HA500 that's printed on these drives.
I've seen the actual blue drives to have the Sata 6GB/S PC HA500 printed on them while the sketchy one Ive got had Sata 6GB/S SC HA500:

the other side:

another 4TB blue HDD image from Amazon:

what does this refer to? is this a refurbished HDD sold as new? the HDD sentinel reported everything ok, but due to scratches on the drive and a weird marks around one of the screws on the side, and bogus label,and not having any black coverings on those circles, I didn't trust it. have you encountered anything like this before as well?


thanks a lot in advance

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

The model number will give you more information than that.

https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief-wd-blue-pc-hdd.pdf

and here is some idea of how to decode the model numbers (but it is a bit older info)

https://products.wdc.com/library/Flyer/ENG/2579-001028.pdf

I don't know that the letters in question denote anything of interest (at least, not as to whether or not the drive is a refurb) but all the drive info can be found in model number. You'd have to talk to WD to be sure. They have decent support, give them a shout.

 

[Harlow]

I agree the label on your disk drive is confusing, given that WD Surveillance drives are usually Purple, but the disk label is Blue.

Personally, I much prefer WD Purple drives for general data storage and not WD Blue drives, because Purple drives are CMR/PMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) running at 7200RPM, but Blue drives run slower at 5400RPM and are often (but not always) SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording). EZRZ drives tend to be CMR and EZAZ are usually SMR.

If all you're doing is archiving data on a single drive (no RAID), it doesn't make much difference if the underlying technology is CMR 7200RPM or SMR 5400RPM, but if you're using the drive intensively, e.g. continuous read/write operations, then an SMR drive will slow down compared to a CMR drive.

One place where you should avoid SMR drives like the plague, is in FreeNAS/TrueNAS RAIDZx servers, where replacing a failed disk in an array of SMR drives can take days to "resilver", as opposed to hours in an array of CMR drives.

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-4tb-smr-or-cmr/271114

https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

 

[Master]

The model number will give you more information than that.

https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief-wd-blue-pc-hdd.pdf

and here is some idea of how to decode the model numbers (but it is a bit older info)

https://products.wdc.com/library/Flyer/ENG/2579-001028.pdf

I don't know that the letters in question denote anything of interest (at least, not as to whether or not the drive is a refurb) but all the drive info can be found in model number. You'd have to talk to WD to be sure. They have decent support, give them a shout.

thanks a lot really appreciate it. I surely will do

I agree the label on your disk drive is confusing, given that WD Surveillance drives are usually Purple, but the disk label is Blue.

Personally, I much prefer WD Purple drives for general data storage and not WD Blue drives, because Purple drives are CMR/PMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) running at 7200RPM, but Blue drives run slower at 5400RPM and are often (but not always) SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording). EZRZ drives tend to be CMR and EZAZ are usually SMR.

If all you're doing is archiving data on a single drive (no RAID), it doesn't make much difference if the underlying technology is CMR 7200RPM or SMR 5400RPM, but if you're using the drive intensively, e.g. continuous read/write operations, then an SMR drive will slow down compared to a CMR drive.

One place where you should avoid SMR drives like the plague, is in FreeNAS/TrueNAS RAIDZx servers, where replacing a failed disk in an array of SMR drives can take days to "resilver", as opposed to hours in an array of CMR drives.

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-4tb-smr-or-cmr/271114

https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

thanks, I am more concerned about a scam going on here, selling old/repaired HDDs as new, but thanks anyway

 

[Dr. Dro]

To address your initial question, this is the "hard drive type". Western Digital has merged with HGST, and their modern HDDs use primarily HGST design bases. Their consumer-grade HDDs are derived from the HGST Deskstar line and their business/enterprise-class drives from the HGST Ultrastar line.

 

[Harlow]

If you suspect the drive is a scam, i.e. re-labelled old stock with all the SMART data zeroed, you could run a long surface test to check for bad blocks.

I use the non-destructive surface read test in Hard Disk Sentinel, because it creates a "pretty" display, showing places where the test has to re-try certain blocks multiple times. The image below shows a particularly bad drive, with 194 Damaged and 503 Bad sectors. This drive is junk. Note: This particular test took 10hrs, 10mins, 31sec.

On the other hand, this is what you should see after testing a brand new drive with no problems.

If you see a number of darker green squares, this might indicate a used (but potentially good) drive. The presence of darker green squares does not automatically mean the drive is used.

 

[Master]

thanks everyone
it happens that it was indeed a refurbished/relabeled HDD. the scammers got the label wrong otherwise my dumbass wouldn't have even imagined facing a refurbished drive like this!
but like always I learned a lot here and I genuinely thank you all for your invaluable knowledge/expertise/experience.
God bless you all.

 

[R-T-B]

Your first clue was there are no "blue" surveillance line drives.

 

[Assimilator]

This is why I don't buy second-hand storage. There are just too many ways to get screwed over.

 

[Ruru]

This is why I don't buy second-hand storage. There are just too many ways to get screwed over.

Normally yes, unless the seller is someone I know.