I have seen several of these white label drives come through my ReplayTV business. They came from people who have sent me their drives for service. They purchased their drives through eBay sellers, flea market vendors, or low price Pricewatch sellers. Check out the link on my post and you can see the difference between the drives. Note that you can almost read a Made in USA logo on the white label drive and the OEM/retail drive says Made in Singapore. Well, they are all made in Singapore and the Made in USA tag is simply there for the system builder, like Dell, IBM, Sonicblue, or Compaq. The system builder then prints its own warranty information right on the drive.
There is a bar code on the end of the drive but Maxtor does not recognize the number. It is a unique number but it is not valid per Maxtor tech support. They tell you to talk to the vendor who built your computer. Now that would be difficult if you only bought the drive. I know this because one of the drives sent to me by a customer failed the recertification process and I couldn't load the RTV software on it. I talked to Maxtor on behalf of the customer and even thought the drive was brand new and DOA, there was nothing they could do. The drive didn't register in their system because there was not a valid serial number.