While the drives may be different, there is no way that the consumer line will ever be the 'same' drive as their top of the line Gold/enterprise HGST drives.
There's a reason why these are popular--because they're cheap. But there's also a reason datacenters don't use them--because they're not the same as a real enterprise drive. Make no mistake about that. And the article proves that point as well, hence why it will be valid until the market segmentation no longer exists at WD.
Apparently you have never really worked with hard drives or you wouldn't be uttering such foolishness.
The label can be the same, lol--yeah and that can be done for a bunch of reasons. Doesn't mean jack anymore. If the part number was that important, then the warranty attached to the part number would be the same because the drives were the same. But they're not and there's further differentiation in the serial number.
No doubt these drives (if not all drives) now start from a common assembly line and then are basically 'binned' based on their quality as is common with technology manufacturers. But just because a grade C drive and a grade A drive share the same parts, they are not the same sum of these same parts.
This part is likely correct. They are the same drive in the sense of hardware parts, but not the same drive in the sense of quality.
However quality wise you should note that they are still better made than consumer grade drives, which uses cheaper parts and technology at the first place.
Warranty is not related at all. Warranty is a support service, and you can attach any period of warranty as you wish. For example, my ex company provides lifetime warranty for our servers with Seagate ES.3 drives. Of course, those drives are backed by only 5 year warranty, but we charge more and we self-warrant / self-insure. We replace the drives with brand new ones even after 7-8 years of purchase.
Another example is Seagate Exos drives shucked from expansions. They used to have warranty data on their website but they later revised them. New drives from RMA replacement also have different warranty (inheriting from the replaced drive).
Warranty cannot prove any of your points at all.
I'd like to see the data behind the 'proof' that the easystore drives are 7200rpm--their performance in the STH article was even below that of a 5400 genuine red drive.
You are free to look it up. WD had admitted that they mislabeled some of the 7200RPM and claimed to correctly label them at near future.
The 8TB and above "5400 genuine red drive"s are also 7200 RPM drives.
In fact, WD never actually write "5400 RPM" on their drive specs. It has always been "5400 RPM Class", which has nothing to do with RPM at all.
It's like you buy a car that has "V6 power class" engine. Does it have a V6 engine? Maybe. It doesn't even need to have an engine. It can have an electric motor that produces V6-like power. Don't fool yourself with marketing terms and take that as "facts". You are not talking about "facts", you simply trust whatever they said. Which is reasonable because a regular consumer has no way to actually measure the RPM of a drive. It doesn't have a tachometer.