
Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” - ha5u
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-trying-to-redefine-the-word-rpm/
======
ha5u
The German-language forum that the article mentions has been doing some great
detective work:
[https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/crystaldiskinf...](https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/crystaldiskinfo-
zeigt-fakewert-an-alle-wd-my-book-8tb-drehen-anscheind-mit-7-200rpm.1235655/)

The conclusion on page 4 of the above thread:

> Non-Pro RED = 5400rpm according to data sheet

> Pro Red = 7200rpm according to data sheet

> Internal both 7200rpm and 120Hz.

> Apparently _all_ WD / HGST helium plates have real 7200rpm, no matter what
> it says.

Simply absurd, if true. Here, for example, is a screenshot of WD's WD100EFAX
store page: [https://imgur.com/HseW9Pa](https://imgur.com/HseW9Pa)

No mention of an RPM "class". The spec sheet does refer to it as "5400 RPM
Class", but with no further description of what the term means:
[https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149...](https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149-eng_spec_data_sheet_2879-800002.pdf)

What a world when you can't even trust the spec sheet. What's next, 10 watt
class drives that pull 20 watts? 3-year class warranties?

~~~
smnrchrds
> _What a world when you can 't even trust the spec sheet. What's next, 10
> watt class drives that pull 20 watts? 3-year class warranties?_

Just like how internet speeds are advertised ("Up to 300 Mb/s").

~~~
orbital-decay
There's a solid technical reason for that though, as ISPs have no control over
the performance of your connection's remote part. Sure, it leaves plenty of
room for abuse, but this is a necessary disclaimer, not some slippery
marketing.

~~~
akhosravian
Does anyone in the US actually get the “up to” even plugging directly into the
ISP provided modem at off peak times?

~~~
xoa
Yes, absolutely. On all 5 different sites I manage in fact, two on a local ISP
ADSL, third on local ISP fiber, fourth on Comcast Business cable modem, and
even the fifth on a small regional WISP. All of them are reliably within a few
percent of their expected speed with about the frequency that one would
reasonably expect from that connection class. "Up-to" is fuzzy but quite
justified with many technologies. Proper fiber of course is rock solid and
essentially never has issues short of a backhoe. But ADSL falls off hard with
distance, and a lot of the in-house wiring it's forced through is ancient
garbage phone line. Sometimes one can get a huge practical boost just from
shortening/replacing line with cat 5. And WISPs obviously have to deal with
inclement weather fade as well as any additional obstacles for subpar sites
that customers can't/won't rectify. Cable is more of a shared resource though
you get much better support and less bullshit with business class even though
Comcast are bastards.

Now, I absolutely would love to see it mandated by law that somewhere upfront
in ISP info to consumers it's required to have a standardized SLA. A consumer-
level SLA for sure, but still have it formalized and cover all of the basics.
So not just absolute max bandwidth, but 90%/50%/whatever bandwidth, any
guaranteed floor, 90% latency, any data caps, any throttling criteria, etc.
All categories the same and measured in a mandated standardized way so
universally comparable. I don't expect data center level SLAs at all, but
there isn't any reason there can't be that level of _clarity_.

But residential/SOHO and such service inherently has more uncertainty and more
compromises and capacity multipliers to meet lower prices. I think that's ok,
just that it should be laid out and not buried in some fine print or support
page in the disused lavatory defended by a leopard either.

------
mokus
Maybe I should apply to WD and fill my resume with things like “25-years-class
experience as distinguished-class engineer-class for HGST-class employer”.

~~~
chrisseaton
Do you realise in that on the context of this story that would mean you had
_more_ then 25 years of experience, so they’d be happy.

~~~
Klinky
Maybe salary negotiations is a better time to bring it up. "100K Class" salary
request, with the actual figure being 33%~ higher.

------
userbinator
It seems like they want customers to compare their 7200RPM drives to
competitors' 5400RPM ones, but the power consumption numbers in the datasheet
show the actual differences.

For many years, the WD Green series didn't even specify the RPM.

I hate marketing...

------
jasonhansel
This reminds me of how, to make a whole lineup of Intel chips, they just make
the highest-price model, and then disable features to create the lower-price
ones. Or how shorter-range Teslas have the same battery capacity as longer-
range ones--they just disable using the extra capacity in software.

In this case, the "5400 RPM" drive runs at 7200 RPM, but WD presumably makes
it (either via software or hardware) perform worse in other ways to
compensate, so that its performance is really only competitive with actual
5400 RPM drives.

That way, they can justify the lower price point without actually needing two
separate manufacturing processes for each kind of drive (like how Intel saves
on having to redesign each chip in a lineup).

~~~
augustt
They'll start with the same silicon design but manufacturing variability
requires them to bin the chips based on functionality & performance, which is
how you get all these different models.

~~~
crest
Nobody would complain if Intel sold of 8core dies with 6 working cores as
6core CPUs. Disabling the ECC or AES-NI support just to create artificial
market segmentation is an asshole move.

------
fouc
This sort of misrepresentation should be outright illegal.

Why does it feel like big corporations are just getting more blatantly evil
these days?

~~~
boomboomsubban
This is already what they did with "KB/MB/GB/TB." Evil, but not any more
blatant.

~~~
throw0101a
> _This is already what they did with "KB/MB/GB/TB."_

The 'confusion' as to whether the "K" prefix meant a factor of 10^3 or 2^10
goes back decades.

In 1961 a book says "it is more usual to express the speed in bits or kilobits
(1,000 bits) per second"; an IBM 1410 manual says ""The 40K core array
requires 40,000 valid five-position addresses from 0,000 to 39,999." In 1962
an ACM paper referred to a "4K IBM 1401" which had 4000 characters of storage,
but in 1964 Amdahl wrote a paper that had 1K meaning 1024. Academics went back
and forth a bit it seems.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes)

For hard drives specifically, a 1974 example has Mbytes in the 10^6 sense.
Further examples often have drives using the base-10 sense of the prefix
(including the first 5 ¼ inch floppy), while memory chips using the base-2
sense of the prefix.

The powers-of-1024 nomenclature of kibi/mebi/etc was introduced in 1995, with
IEEE mandating SI prefixes only be used for powers-of-1000 in 1997. The IEC
follows suit a couple of years later.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix)

~~~
userbinator
_In 1962 an ACM paper referred to a "4K IBM 1401" which had 4000 characters of
storage, but in 1964 Amdahl wrote a paper that had 1K meaning 1024._

That's easy to explain, as a 1401 is actually a _decimal_ computer.

~~~
throw0101a
Further up:

> In the 1950s, "1 kilobit" meant 1000 bits:[9][10]

------
causality0
Did Western Digital have some kind of management shakeup in the last few
years? Back in the day my general impression was that they were a quality
brand that engaged in less bullshit than the likes of Seagate and Hitachi. It
seems the tables have turned.

~~~
wtallis
They bought SanDisk in 2016, and that part of the business is now probably
seen as having more strategic importance (their "President, Technology and
Strategy" is a SanDisk guy).

They got a new CEO this year, but the previous CEO had been HGST's CEO until
WDC bought HGST and put him in charge. (He was also previously HGST's CFO, and
before that, WDC's CFO.)

But I don't think a management change is particularly important here. Their
competitors were caught doing the same BS with SMR drives. I think we're just
seeing what happens when a lucrative duopoly gets sidelined by replacement
technology. The consumer hard drive market has become a market for lemons, and
only the datacenter customers get treated seriously anymore.

------
dorkwood
"By doing so, we are able to leverage our economies of scale and pass along
those savings to our customers."

So it sounds like the reason behind it is that they can save money by
eliminating the 5400rpm production line.

~~~
393339
Exactly, but then they rightly realized they would also lose all those
customers looking for 5400rpm disks. And, no no no, they didn't want THAT.

Easy fix though, smack a new 5400rpm label on those disks and fix the firmware
to report 5400rpm, now they could get rid of the production line and retain
the customers that weren't looking for 7200rpm disks.

Absolute garbage.

------
qalmakka
After all this news of false advertisement and lower quality drives from WD,
I'm glad I bought Seagate drives, even if only because Amazon had a big fat
discount on Barracudas the day I was shopping for some spinning rust.

~~~
bleepblorp
I wouldn't touch a Barracuda with a WD SMR drive duct taped to a 50' pole.

The only way to get good hard drives these days is to buy from the enterprise
lines e.g. WD Gold or Seagate Exos. They're extremely expensive, but this is
the only way to get the kind of quality that used to be standard a few years
ago.

~~~
kohtatsu
You fell directly in line with what they wanted.

It's reasonable to expect companies to honour their spec sheets, and to not
lie in their firmware.

Once they're caught doing otherwise it's important to hold them accountable,
not throw our hands up and pay up anyway.

~~~
taylodl
The problem is if you don't buy from the commercial line you're asking for
trouble. I just had a Seagate drive fail after 2 years of use. The WD drive it
replaced had been in service for _years_. Consumer grade has apparently really
degraded quite significantly the past few years, so much so I'm seriously
starting to reconsider whether the "Apple tax" might be worth it - or is Apple
now using low-grade components too?

------
AnonHP
I’ve not touched WD drives in a long, long time, and the recent SMR fiasco
made the brand seem even more untrustworthy than what was in my imagination.

In this case, it sounds (from the official response) as if WD is trying to
“dumb down” the specs so that generally less informed buyers can compare them
easily and make the right choices?! But this effort will fail because it hides
information in scenarios where it certainly must cater to different needs —
not everyone wants all the speed at a specific price just as not everyone
wants the lowest power consumption at a specific price.

The discerning users who want to get the specs and then decide what trade offs
are worth it for their use case must be able to get it, even if it’s on page 6
of the “technical specifications” document.

~~~
p1necone
"In this case, it sounds (from the official response) as if WD is trying to
“dumb down” the specs so that generally less informed buyers can compare them
easily and make the right choices"

Which is total bullshit, because what "less informed buyers" even read spec
sheets? The spec sheet is for people that want detailed technical information.
Info for the average consumer should be on the retail box and store
descriptions.

------
chrisseaton
I think the TLDR is that Western Digital are selling faster drives marketed as
being slower than they actually are, presumably due to lack of supply for the
demand of the slower drives part of the market or something like that.

You'd think nobody would mind until you remember some people want lower power
and noise.

Ideally these people would be buying based on those actual metrics, rather
than the RPM as a proxy for them, if that's what they really wanted, but I
don’t know if that’s on the data sheets.

~~~
AnssiH
> Ideally these people would be buying based on those actual metrics, rather
> than the RPM as a proxy for them, if that's what they really wanted, but I
> don’t know if that’s on the data sheets.

Power use and acoustics are listed in WD datasheets, but I guess they might
not be well comparable to values from other manufacturers.

~~~
smnrchrds
> _Power use and acoustics are listed in WD datasheets_

Given the fact that they lied about RPM on their datasheets, why should anyone
believe other pieces of information on their datasheets are correct?

~~~
AnssiH
They seem to have lied elsewhere like in store pages (per other HN comments),
but the datasheets specifically only mention "Performance Class" being "5400
RPM Class", which may be misleading but is not a lie IMO.

------
swiley
This kind of crap is why I hate shopping for computer hardware.

~~~
acidbaseextract
In general it's an amazing time to be a computer hardware consumer. There's
real competition in pretty much every primary component hardware vertical. The
spinning rust data storage market has been uniquely crappy of late.

The sketchy stuff shows up in cheap components with slim margins (budget AIO
watercoolers, budget hard drives, budget PSUs budget/no-name ebay video
cards).

~~~
ric2b
There isn't a lot of competition on GPU's, which happen to be one of the most
expensive components.

That market is basically just Nvidia (80%+ market share and still dominating
in performance/features).

~~~
swiley
> That market is basically just Nvidia

I'm typing this on a machine with a fairly powerfull AMD GPU. The market for
Nvidia is basically just Nvidia, everyone keeps using their special APIs.
Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers and their
drivers _suck_ because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive
crap.

~~~
ric2b
> The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia

It's over 80% of GPU the market.

> Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers

AMD can't compete with Nvidia's high end. Especially with the new 30XX series,
which crush the performance of Nvidia's 20XX series.

> and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-
> competitive crap.

Their drivers have a lot of features that AMD doesn't, like G-Sync, DLSS, RTX
and others.

------
Fej
Adjacent to WD's recent scumminess, I recently purchased an Ultrastar drive
(no longer HGST-branded) and it came with a slip in the box informing me that
by purchasing this product (from B&H) I had somehow agreed to binding
arbitration.

Companies have been abusing the ability to force consumers into binding
arbitration but this is another level. I'm not a lawyer but it doesn't seem to
be clear if this would hold up in court; it is however pretty clearly a scare
tactic, which is almost worse.

~~~
bleepblorp
The USSC has ruled that binding arbitration clauses in shrink-wrap consumer
contracts are legal and enforceable.

For the usual reasons, congress has refused to change the law to vacate the
ruling.

~~~
Fej
It's not quite so clear, the Wikipedia article on the subject has a bird's eye
view of the relevant case law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract)

For this drive, there is no explicit acceptance of the terms given and the
terms are unavailable before not just purchase, but before opening of the box.

Thank you for the comment, I've edited mine to reflect the ambiguity.

------
remote_phone
Don’t drive with higher RPMs have higher transfer rates? I find it hard to
believe that people are complaining about better performance.

~~~
p1necone
Higher transfer rates, but also higher noise and power consumption (and
presumably higher failure rates, but I'm less certain about that) - if you
don't _need_ the higher speed, 5400rpm drives are actually better.

------
aj7
Reminds me of the special Thursday night edition of Monday night football, and
three-part “imaginary” Superman novellas of my youth.

------
m463
I was expecting to read that 2x the heads would be marketed as spinning 2x
faster, but ... it seems they are selling 7200 rpm drives as 5400.

There might be more power consumption, but in this case they are selling you a
faster drive.

I kind of think this should be ok.

I wonder if mustang guys ordered a 6-cylinder mustang and got the v8 - would
they complain about gas mileage?

~~~
ashtonkem
If I bought a Prius and they gave me a V8 I sure as heck would.

~~~
m463
That's an interesting take on my analogy.

I don't know if they advertised it as a low power drive, but if they did it
would be surprising in a negative sense.

~~~
ashtonkem
That is exactly why you’d want 5400 RPM in a non-budget drive; lower power,
lower noise, longer drive lifespan.

------
RachelF
That's what happens when you have little competition.

Right now the high capacity, non-SSD hard drive market is a duopoly between WD
and Seagate. Customers have little choice.

~~~
bfuclusion
SSD volumetric capacity already exceeds spinning disk, and we're just waiting
for the price to come down. The horse's dealer's competition wasn't more
stables, it was the car.

~~~
katbyte
SSDs expire, large long term r/w storage where speed isn’t important rust
still wins

~~~
tuatoru
... rust on _tape_ , that is.

------
Havoc
>That increase in noise and power is what got many users on the trail of
Western Digital's fake 5,400rpm spindle speed in the first place

I'm amazed that there are people that would pick this up. I genuinely wouldn't
notice a drive being a tiny bit louder/hotter

~~~
MaulingMonkey
You might not notice _a_ drive being a tiny bit louder/hotter, but you might
notice if you've got an entire NAS rack full of 'em. Don't shout at your
JBODs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4)

~~~
ars
I've always been told that drives in the same enclosure should all spin at the
same RPM.

Exactly because of the issue in that video: if there are different RPMs they
shake each other and cause problems.

I've never actually tested if this is true, but I've always made sure to honor
it.

If in fact it is true, that this lie by Western digital is even worse.

