
Multiple Western Digital 5400RPM drives are actually 7200RPM drives - hosteur
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ikk0rv/psa_multiple_wd_5400rpm_drives_are_actually/
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hosteur
Getting 7200 rpm drives when expecting 5400 rpm drives may result in increased
power consumtion and heat issues. Pluse 7200 rpm drives are noticably more
noisy than 5400 rpm drives.

Many EMAZ and EZAZ seems to be affected.

It seems that the iOS app Phyphox can be used to determine if your drive is
running at 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm using acoustic analysis.

From the comments:

> "There is an app called phyphox that allows you to access all of your
> phone's sensors. If you download it and use the Acceleration spectrum
> feature, you can measure the speed of your drive by simply placing your
> phone on top of the drive. The application is surprisingly accurate and I
> use it to check the health of my drives."

~~~
rbinv
If my memory serves me right, 7200 rpm result in higher spinning but reduced
seeking/head noise (which I personally dislike more).

edit: I'm probably wrong

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noisem4ker
Why would rotation speed inversely affect head noise?

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sandworm101
Ever drive a manual transmission? At very low RPM the engine will seem to
_shake_ more. It isn't so much that there is less vibration at higher speeds
but that it occurs at a higher frequency. That means the amount the part
physically moves from one side of the oscillation to another is less, just as
a higher-revving engine doesn't bounce around as much as it would at lower
RPM. The total amount of noise/vibration may be similar but the change in
frequency can still have other effects.

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uptown
The hard drive industry is such a weirdly complex marketplace. For example,
there's people dedicated to "shucking" the external hard drives for the
purpose of extracting the drives inside for use in a NAS or wherever, which
would normally sell for higher than those with the external enclosure
included, then chronicling the types and attributes of the drives they've
found. The
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/)
subreddit is a strange place.

~~~
agumonkey
Not sure if this will go on, often enough, USB hdd have dedicated controllers
with direct usb bridge, you can't use it as sata unless full mod.

~~~
dawnerd
Not the mybooks which is what people are shucking. I have about 20 in my nas
and they’re going strong. For ~$120/8TB hard to go wrong when they’re
essentially red drives inside (they’ve switched to white label drives with the
same-ish specs).

The controller card inside of the enclosure is just a simple usb and power
converter.

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drtillberg
I bought a WD SSD recently and when I plugged it in, the firmware reported
that is was actually a SanDisk, which is I guess a lower-end WD brand at this
point. I saw an Internet discussion of other people having this problem with a
July 2020 batch of SSDs, so I texted into Amazon support which promised to
send a WD drive that didn't report itself as a SanDisk drive to the system.

I'm sure you can guess where this goes. The replacement unit arrived a few
days later-- this drive also was marked WD on the outside and identified
itself to BIOS etc. as a SanDisk drive. I called Amazon support again and they
appeared to consider it a manufacturing defect and I returned it for a refund.

I'm not sure how much I care about whether the drive is SanDisk or WD, but it
ought to be consistent. If WD can't get that simple step right I'm not sure
why I should trust them to secure and maintain the integrity of a TB of
important data.

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tenbino
I would have thought giving a customer a faster than spec product isn’t a
terrible sin.

~~~
bragh
In this case it is. High capacity 7200 rpm drives can be unbelievably noisy,
to the level that they are not recommended for home theatre NAS as you can
hear the seeking sound during a movie or from the next room at night.

~~~
codetrotter
Speaking of seeking, if the data was laid out sequentially on disk, and the
computer was not accessing any other files on the disk in question (spinning
disks for movies and other data, SSD or m.2 for OS itself), then it would be
very silent. But my impression is that a lot of the time we end up with files
fragmented more than what is desirable. That's another wish of mine, that I
would have a system that would keep this in mind and which would be better
tuned to my use. Maybe one day.

~~~
rbinv
Windows had (has?) a defrag tool for this purpose. With SSDs, it's not an
issue.

~~~
srtjstjsj
Windows 10 had a bug this year where it defragged the SSD (yes) on every boot
instead of once a month.

~~~
7v3x3n3sem9vv
Wow first I've heard of this, do you have a source? I'd like to read more
about it.

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gsnedders
How much mechanical difference is there between (designed as) 5400rpm and
7200rpm drives nowadays? I'm somewhat surprised that they seem to be faking
the performance characteristics rather than changing the rotation speed?

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kasabali
That's simply not possible. Tolerances are too tight on a modern drive.

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srtjstjsj
Can HDs be (safely and effectively) slowed down by the user, with appropriate
drivers? If not, why not?

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toast0
Most likely not. The motors are most likely fixed speed. Even if not, the
speed is unlikely to be setable through the sata interface, you would need to
adjust the firmware --- and it's not usually a good idea to adjust hard drive
firmware without deep knowledge.

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mayama
That's strange. I would assume 7200rpm drive would be costly to produce
compared to 5400rpm. What possible reason could they have to falsely
advertising which could be a loss.

~~~
Someone1234
Economies of scale.

Producing 7200 RPM drives likely is more costly than 5400 in isolation, but
running two full production lines itself is costly, when you could just run
one and "fix it" via software.

Plus it allows you to vary the number of 5400/7200 RPM drives you "produce" to
exactly what the market wants. Just keep them unlabeled in a warehouse as
orders arrive: label, firmware, and ship.

~~~
srtjstjsj
Those would be 5400rpm drives maybe 7200rpm capable), then, not 7200rpm.

