>>>> disklabel improperly identifies the drive's rpm at 3600--it's a
>>>> 7200 rpm drive
>>> I don't know why this is.
>> This means essentially nothing.  The RPM value is just another
>> number the disklabel stores for anyone that might care to look for
>> it, like the geometry figures or the text label string [...]
> I just find it odd that this information is reported inaccurately.  I
> would assume that the origin of this info comes from "encoded" data
> (codes) located in the device's (hard drive) firmware.

I don't think it does.  The drive firmware undoubtedly does know the
drive's RPM, in some sense, but I don't know of any way - much less any
way that's portable across models, never mind across manufacturers - to
get it to report it to the host.  I suspect disklabel simply defaults
to 3600 for historical reasons and nobody ever bothered to fix that
default when labeling the drive you have.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B