My article clearly explains how to read the number of heads off a HD Tune benchmark graph, with particular reference to WD models, and with appropriate pictorial examples. The statement which you have cherry-picked has been taken out of context. It refers to one unusual Seagate HDD that was the subject of a long thread at Seagate’s old forum. In fact the method that forms the basis of my article was brought to my attention by an end user named Floyd, and I thank him for it. Together we were able to subsequently make sense of the unusual graph, and we did this by dumping Seagate’s firmware. In the end everything became crystal clear, and you would know this if you read the article all the way to the end.
In any case, what is preventing you from uploading your own graphs? There are no serial numbers, so there would be no reason for the moderator not to approve them.
As for rotation speed, if your drive were a genuine Caviar Black, then AIUI it should be reporting its RPM to HD Tune. It’s WD’s Green drives that report an RPM of 0, and that’s because WD obfuscates their performance with their IntelliPower marketing nonsense. Nevertheless, it is still possible to determine their RPM from HD Tune’s read benchmark graph, but you need to understand just a little bit about how drives work.
For example, the speed of the drive in the following example is 7200 RPM:
http://dyra.eu/sites/default/files/HD_Tune_2_55-HardDiskUtility.jpg
This can be deduced from the access time graph in a matter of seconds.
The transfer rate curve tells us that the drive is fully stroked, and that it most likely has a data density of 500GB per platter. Therefore it would probably have 2 heads. However, this could be more accurately determined by following the simple procedure in my article.
The numbers on the label and on the PCB all have a special meaning which I would be prepared to explain to you, but once again you have decide that such information is irrelevant. (You can redact the model number before posting the image.) What is clear is that the two model numbers have different family identifiers in the suffix (J37 versus Z3).
Your questions regarding cache can be answered with a reference to the ATA standard. Simply put, the ATA standard provides no way for a drive to report a cache size of 32MB or greater. Therefore such drives report 0 for this parameter. You can determine the actual cache size by examining the SDRAM on the PCB, but this would require some basic skill which you appear not to possess or be willing to exercise.
As for the performance numbers, you are correct, they are not very useful. The following graph should tell you why:
http://proline.pl/forum_pic/wd-wd5002aalx_1dcy8vz.jpg
“Speccy gives heads, cylinders, tracks, and sectors”, but these numbers are essentially useless. They bear no relationship to the actual drive geometry.
