I’m just playing about with a bunch of old hard drives to sell on eBay and I was wondering why no standard ever emerged for the jumper pin layout (for setting the drive as Master/Slave etc) - I’ve even got a couple of different capacity drives from the same manufacturer (and the same series in their range) which have different pin layouts.
I’m guessing it’s just because it’s cheaper and easier to put a sticker on the drive that shows the appropriate jumper settings than to try to get a bunch of competing manufacturers to agree on a standard. I just can’t see any significant financial benefit to the companies involved for standardizing this.