Well those measurements of rotational speed are just, like, your <em>opinion</em>, man...
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Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”
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The merchants don't understand, and assume the manufacturer does.
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I wonder if whoever used to do the same lying crap at intel is now at WD.
Or maybe is an student of that person.
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I do not like any of the HDD manufacturers that much. Western Digital keeps getting caught with false or misleading ads. Seagate moved its legal domicile to Dublin, Ireland while keeping its operational headquarters to use a legal loophole to essentially cheat on its taxes. Toshiba has the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal as seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal in its history, and does not offer any models with 5 year warranties unlike the high end consumer drives from Seagate and Western Digital.
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What an absurd world I am living in. Novichok, Trump, covid measures and vaccines, Intel being not about CPUs, Microsoft shipping Linux and embracing open source. Specs that are not specs. What did you Putin my tea? Did I got out of phase and switched to an alternative reality?
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For those who have never seen it, here is a very interesting website, which reports their reliability experience on quantities of drives we could never hope to own:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaz ... s-q1-2020/
Seriously, take a look.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaz ... s-q1-2020/
Seriously, take a look.
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I for one am NOT going to blow $120 on such a box, unless it may also possibly contain a playable character wielding a 7200rpm Western Digital chainsaw!
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I guess gaming semantics is easier than creating a better product anymore.
Jim, thanks for bringing these gymnastics to my attention so consistently.
Jim, thanks for bringing these gymnastics to my attention so consistently.
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I’ve gone from Seagate hater and die hard WD fan to never buying WD again until their management gets a huge shakeup. This is ridiculous.
I’ll be doing my damndest to make sure none of my clients get WD either.
I’ll be doing my damndest to make sure none of my clients get WD either.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Yet another reminder that no business is your friend. If they do something that benefits you, it's likely a side effect of something that benefits them. And their practices may benefit you today, but can easily switch to something harmful tomorrow.
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Holy crap, I'm glad I didn't buy into WD products for my homelab. I'm operating on a very tight power budget because my workstation and 40-core 676 gigs of RAM+72+29 3.5"-bay + a few USB disk homelab are on the same 15A circuit.
I was looking at 5400RPM spinners specifically to conserve power, reduce heat dissipation, and manage noise.
I was looking at 5400RPM spinners specifically to conserve power, reduce heat dissipation, and manage noise.
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Geesh. I'm getting flashbacks to the Pentium 4 days with the games being played. This is what happens when marketing runs the show.
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Didn’t this happen about 15 years ago? It’s actually 8 tibbibytes or something.
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I'm still annoyed with hardware makers in general that they rewrote the definition of megabytes, gigabytes, etc. to cater to the illiterate.
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Here unlike SMR debacle I would say they don't mean bad. From performance point of view 7.2 k rom is better than 5400. However, that changes the power drawn, hear dissipation and probably the disk failure distribution. So not an intentional deception but rather they wanted to have the freedom to swap 5400 and 7200 rpm drivers depending on their supply chain. Still, I would be pissed if the performance of the better same drive model changed from batch to batch
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How about several carmakers (Germans seem to have invented this) that use model numbers that once indicated the engine displacement. Of a normally aspirated engine. When they started using little turbo 4 cylinders, their model numbers seem to have morphed to providing some kind of equivalent normally aspirated engine size that would theoretically produce the HP claimed from the turbo. The turbo, unfortunately, doesn't work the same way so while the peak numbers may be equivalent (or even better) the driving experience can suffer.
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I think in this case these 7200 drives have the same performance as a 5400 because they are slowing down the writes on failed 12TB drives by 33% to get marginal 8TB capacity drives they can sell instead of throwing them away.
So you are getting drives that are as fast as 5400 rpm (hence the '5400 rpm class') while still running noisier, hotter, and with more power consumption. And then they're having the drive lie about how fast it's spinning. This is terrible if you think you're actually buying a 5400 rpm drive. I think it is rather malicious.
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I hate to rain on your parade, here, but Western Digital is absolutely an SSD player.
For example: WD Blue SSDs. Local shops in my area have stocked these for a few years now, and are using them pretty frequently in their default builds.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
I would argue that it falls under deceptive advertising. If I wanted a 5,400RPM drive, I wouldn't buy this one after comparing the higher power consumption to real 5,400RPM drives. But, if I did I think I'd be pissed if I wanted a quieter, cooler drive and discovered this isn't it. So:
1) Yes, they are lying
2) Yes, it does if you are impacted by the differences in characteristics
I was being tongue-in-cheek about the class action lawsuit. Poe's law and all, but I thought the $5 gave it away.
That being said, it's not my hill to die on because I don't purchase hard disks anymore. SSD or bust.
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My guess is that power-conscious consumers wanting 5400rpm drives hadn't occurred to them, and this was more a case of trying to preserve the market segmentation associated with higher spindle speeds, without actually having to maintain two separate product lines.
This is completely speculation here, but imagine: "We want people to really, really know these are the cheap drives, not the fast ones. But we're putting 7200rpm motors in them now because it's not economically feasible to maintain two separate product lines."
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A word of warning: don't buy Exos (or Ultrastar) unless you're willing to read the datasheet and do so thoroughly. Exos—or WD's Ultrastar—can mean CMR, or it can mean host-managed SMR, or it can mean basically anything else, because those lines are intended for sale to enterprise/datacenter customers who absolutely do read the datasheet. The whole datasheet.
If you buy an Exos or Ultrastar and aren't careful, you could end up with a host-managed SMR disk that doesn't even work as a normal drive (instead needing to be managed with, eg, Linux's dm-zoned).
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
HDDs are 8 terabytes, which is 8,000,000,000,000 bytes. In other words, powers of 10.
An SSD would be 8 tebibytes, which is 8,796,093,022,208 bytes. In other words, powers of 2.
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They will bring this concept to the SSD market. Soon with Hardware compression! The 6TB drive! will hold billions of pictures or 2TB of video!. /s
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It's like buying a 55" class TV that's really a 75" panel with the outer several inches taped over. One is industry standard rounding to the nearest whole number marketing size, the other is straight up lying.
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Ignoring that WD completely made up that class and, like usual, don't explain anywhere what it means, what attributes of a 5400rpm drive does this have?
Also, what motorbike is named 750CC-class when it's really a 500CC? Model numbers are entirely different to spec sheets to, I don't know of any motorcycle manufacturer lying in their spec sheets.
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Roughly 512*10^9 bytes. But not exactly 512*10^9 bytes, because the page size is going to be a power of two, and the total device size is an even multiple of the page size, and 10^9 isn't a power of two.
I'm never going to stop being mad about either 1. us nerds way back in the day being sloppy with our language and just using powers-of-ten prefixes for powers-of-two units, or 2. the damn marketers for exploiting that loophole to allow them to sell devices with less capacity than any reasonable person would think they're being advertised with.
If we'd been less sloppy, the damn marketers wouldn't have had a loophole to exploit. If the marketers weren't, you know, marketers, they wouldn't have exploited the loophole because seriously how do you fucking sleep at night when you're that scummy? But both conditions were true, and now we have drives sold in different units than they actually function upon, so yay for that.
And no, Apple, just making Finder start reporting in SI prefixes (despite the fact that your filesystem is still using powers-of-two sector sizes) doesn't "fix it."
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That's why the say right on the package that from their point of view 1 GB = 1 biliion bytes.
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That just means they're not charging extra for the gluten; it's free.
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You're ignoring the fact that these drives report as 5400 RPM drives in the firmware. If it weren't for that they might be able to weasel out with the "class" statement... the fact that they went so far as to code the false rotational speed into the smart reporting demonstrates that their intention was to deceive.
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"Sir. This says 'Monopoly' on it."
"It's essentially the same thing."
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