I’ve performed my commissioning testing on the four units, which achieved satisfactory results, so I have made the decision to forego the warranty. This would likely catch any transit-damaged infant-mortality cases, but is no guarantee. It makes sense then, to stress test the drives and qualify them prior to this. As a result, you really do have to make a decision to forego your warranty before even considering attempting this.
The serial numbers are coded specifically, and if the unit is returned with evidence of tampering, the warranty will be void. Of course, it goes without saying, that if you take out a hard drive from its enclosure, you automatically lose any warranty on the unit. As a bonus, once I’ve extracted the drives inside, I would have some enclosures with bridge chips that do the odd 4kB sector translation, and a few 12v switching power supplies to use in hobby projects. In the external enclosure configuration, they have better shock resistance in transportation, and they have an extra year of warranty. The main reason I went with the external enclosure versions was because I could get them delivered for about AU$5 less per drive than buying the bare drive with a 2-year warranty. Well, seeing as I purchased four of the 6Tb MyBook drives, you didn’t think I would just leave them in their external cases, being strangled by a USB 3.0 bus without UASP, right?