Specifications

     The date codes on the two drives are very close, 04173 and 04174 and the site code is AMK.  I'm getting to a point, bare with me.  The drives should be identical, but there are some differences.  When I first opened the drives, I wasn't sure that they were the same drives.  I thought maybe I had received two different sized drives.

     The most obvious feature is one is shiny and one is dull.  This is only the physical case and has nothing to do with the internals so I wasn't too worried about it.  I flipped the drive over and saw some more differences.  The biggest being the type of memory they used for the 8MB cache.

     Why would this make a difference?  Hopefully, it won't.  I just want to make sure I get the most compatibility from my two drives when they are in a RAID array.

     These are currently some of the largest drives on the market.  There are a few that are larger, but not many.  The formatted size of one of these 200GB drives is 186GB.  This drive is made up of two, 100GB platters.  To my knowledge it's the first drive to do so, with competitors using 80GB platters.  This puts Seagate in a great position to expand to larger drives without much problem.