The PCB

The 750 GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 has a 16 MB SDRAM buffer. In line with their trend to keep the PCB "clean" of surface-mounted components, 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 hard drive, with native support for SATA 3Gb/s but it can revert to the slower SATA 1.5Gb/s if the SATA controller cannot support the faster interface.

Western Digital also offers EIDE versions of this drive, but only for capacities of 320 GB, 400 GB and 500 GB.

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. From what we can tell, Western Digital ships some drives with a jumper and others without a jumper. Since our OEM unit did not come with one, it is likely that only retail drives come with the jumper.

Generally, you do not need to mess around with the jumper block. In this model, placing the jumper across pins 1 and 2 enables Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC).

Placing it across pins 3 and 4 will enable both spread spectrum clocking and the Power Management 2 (PM2) mode, also known as Power Up In Standby (PUIS) mode.

Finally, placing the jumper across pins 5 and 6 will force the drive to use the slower SATA 1.5Gbits/s (OPT1) interface. However, it is recommended that you leave it at its default setting.

The Breather Holes

The 750 GB Caviar SE16 has two breather holes on the underside. You can see them 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!