2 Different Samsung F4 HDD P/N?

[Doco]

so i have two samsung f4 2tb drives and just recently purchased the other 2tb drive from Fry's. what i'm concerned with is the one i bought from Fry's has its HDD P/N right under the model number saying HD204UI/Z4 and the other one i got from newegg a month ago has its HDD P/N saying HD240UI. note there is no /Z4 from the one i purchased from newegg. also, the HD204UI/Z4 drive has a lighter green circuit board on the bottom of the drive while the one from newegg has a darker green circuit board.

is there something i'm not aware of? is this something i should be concerned about? are there different revisions of the samsung f4 2tb drives i don't know about? i'm a skeptical person when they should physically be the exact same thing being 2tb F4 samsung drives.

here's a picture of the bottoms of the drive. the left one is the one from Fry's and the right is from newegg

edit: all i found when i tried googling is "When I'm not ways of, all Samsung drives with P/N with "/anything" are pure OEM units sold to manufacturers and system integrators without the long-term factory warranty". is this correct? so it just means it's basically the same drive with no warranty is all?

edit 2: found a short discussion topic about the /Z4... http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showthread.php?tid=44869&page=1
i'm confused about the whole 4k sector and 512 emulation. i only use these 2tb drives to store media files and nothing else. i partitioned the whole thing using the disk management in Windows 7 and copied files over to it using acrosis. is this another issue i should be worried about?

 

[qubit]

It probably is an OEM difference with the drives. Ask their customer services about this and warranty coverage for the best answer. Or you could access their RMA page and plug in both part numbers and see if there's a difference in warrnty coverage.

The 4K sector size was created to allow drives larger than 2TB to be created. Just google "4K sectors" or "Advanced Format" for lots of good info all about this.

The short answer is that if you're running XP, you'll have problems with these drives and if you're running Vista, 7 or Linux you won't, because they understand it.

 

[jason4207]

I read something about how the F4 drives are all native 4k, but the Z4 version doesn't use the 512 emulation (whereas the non-Z4 uses 512 emulation), but that may have just been an Internet rumor.

If you're using Win7 you should be fine, but there is an issue has come out fairly recently that you may want to be aware of.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks