The PCB

The 500 GB Western Digital Caviar GP has a 16 MB SDRAM buffer. In line with the current trend to keep the PCB "clean" of surface-mounted components though, Western Digital placed the SDRAM chip and controller chips on the reverse side of the PCB.

You can see the solder points on the PCB. Unfortunately, we still do not have a sufficiently small Torx screwdriver to remove the PCB. Hence, we cannot read the chips' details and tell you more about them.

On the other hand, such a layout is good at preventing physical damage (albeit not static damage) to the surface-mounted components. The use of Torx screws, of course, prevents curious users (like us!) from taking apart the drive and unnecessarily increasing Western Digital's RMA rate.

The Connectors

This is a Serial ATA-only hard drive. As far as we can tell, Western Digital does not offer any Parallel ATA versions of this hard drive. It comes with native support for SATA 3Gb/s but can revert to the slower SATA 1.5Gb/s if the SATA controller cannot support the faster interface.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard drive to your PC while it's still running.

To the left side of these SATA connectors is the jumper block. Generally, you do not need to mess around with the jumper block. In this model, it appears to be only used to enable Power Up In Standby (PUIS) for those who need this feature. However, Western Digital did not provide a jumper with the drive.

The Breather Hole

The 500 GB Caviar GP has two breather holes on the underside. You can see them circled in red in the picture below.

These breather holes allow condensation inside the hard drive to escape. They also equalize the hard drive's internal pressure with the ambient pressure. The hard drive needs them to function properly, so please make sure you do not occlude the holes!