Thanks again.
I have reorganised the Identify Device data so that they can be more readily compared against section 7.16.4 of the ATA standards document below.
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/WD20EARS/00MVWB0.TXT
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/WD20EARS/60MVWB0.TXT
Here are the differences:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/WD20EARS/00diff60.txt
Working Draft AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS):
http://www.t13.org/documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2008/D1699r6a-ATA8-ACS.pdf
As expected, there are differences in Advanced Format words 106 and word 209.
The 00MVWB0 drive has zeros for all the Advanced Format words, so it is unable to report its AF capabilities.
Words 117 and 118 indicate that the logical sector size is still only 512 bytes for both drives.
Word 106 for the 60MVWB0 drive indicates that the ratio of Physical sector size to Logical sector size is 8:1 (0x6003), meaning that the drive has 4KB physical sectors.
Word 209 (Alignment of logical blocks within a physical block, 0x4000) indicates that there is no alignment jumper installed. The jumper at pins 7 and 8, if installed, adds a +1 sector offset to the LBA value. For example, if Windows XP accesses LBA 63 (ie the boot sector of the first partition), and if the jumper is present, then the drive transparently accesses LBA 64 instead.
Among the other differences, I notice that the 60MVWB0 supports SCT Error Recovery Control (word 206) whereas the 00MVWB0 does not. This suggests that the 60MVWB0 would be a better choice for RAID-ing, at least in software RAIDs where the ERC timeouts could be set at bootup. Otherwise the ERC settings are volatile, ie they do not survive a power cycle.
The 00MVWB0 supports the HPA feature set (words 82 and 85) whereas the 60MVWB0 does not. This means that the 00MVWB0 can be configured with a smaller capacity.
The 00MVWB0 supports Power Up In Standby (PUIS, words 83 and 86) and AAM (word 83).
As well as the Identify Device data, I notice that there are differences in several SMART attributes.
For example, instead of reporting both temperature attributes (C2 and BE) as is usually the case for most HDDs, the 00MVWB0 uses only C2, and the 60MVWB0 uses only BE. Some users have reported that this causes problems for some RAID controllers which rely on one particular attribute for their temperature reporting.
The following SMART attributes were added for the 60MVWB0:
End-to-End Error
Reported Uncorrectable Errors
Command Timeout
