Interpreting the SKU/product code for hard disks

Question

I always find it rather annoying that it's often the case that HDDs don't actually list the capacity on them in a human readable form (the single most useful bit of information). I did come across a link that showed how the product SKUs for Seagate, Western Digital, etc are put together so you can interpret them.

I have a Seagate ST340014A here and I recall that some of the constituent parts of that SKU denote the capacity, speed, number of platters, etc. Can anyone point me towards the explanation?

Answer 1

It is different for every manufacturer. I will try to update as I find them.

The product code is typically made from, model series, capacity, RPM and a few other IDs.

Seagate see here (From fideli's answer)

Western Digital:

Answer 2

For Seagate, check out this Knowledge Base article. Although it's useful, that model number does not indicate anything about speed or number of platters. As much as I don't like solutions like this, it's far easier to just Google the model number. For computer and electronic parts, this works well and generally leads to the product specifications.