Keep in mind there are at least THREE differant types of hardware sold, not just retail and "OEM' but retail, bulk packaged, and "oem." Many companies misuse the OEM term, OEM is supposed to be stuff without warranty from the manufacture. Generally they mean bulk packaged (i.e. just in the bag, or white box) when they say OEM. Almost all bulk packaged stuff is supported by the full warranties, at least in my experiance for things like hard drives. In this particular case, dell is selling OEM drives which means the warranty is from dell, and its ONE YEAR not 3. Test it out, enter the serial in the WD warranty web site. My drives from dell weren't covered. Anyway, this is not a hot deal, and its misinformation, so it needs to be locked
The whole reason dell buys OEM stuff is so that they can buy it real cheap since they tell WD that Dell will do support, not WD, so they get a discount for that. That's differant than bulk packaged stuff. Normally for bulk, they tell you to call the manufacture for support, so that means its not OEM.