Does the spec sheet have inaccurate decibel and watts information provided, such that the drive being purchased has inappropriate noise (decibels) and thermal (watts used) properties when compared to the specifications printed for those specific properties? Or has everyone been taking for granted that '5400 rpm' is a shortcut for 'cool and quiet' and is just now realizing that they should have been reading the actual 'cool' and 'quiet' specifications instead of using search keyword '5400' to stand in for that diligence?
I think Western Digital just made a year's worth of profits off of people who don't read spec sheets, and they have a plausible interpretation that would unfortunately will probably survive a court challenge. Western Digital has clearly taken the position that '5400 RPM' has always been a statement of disk I/O performance, never a statement about other characteristics, and so by saying '5400 RPM Class' they only mean the drive's I/O performance, not any of those other secondary characteristics that led to the uproar we're discussing.
Western Digital is in the wrong here — not for repricing 'cool and quiet' drives, but for communication — and should have just openly said:
"We're ending production of quiet-cool 5400 RPM drives in our consumer product lines. If cost is of most concern to your installation, our consumer products will continue to meet your needs. If heat and noise are of most concern to your installation, our professional products with WhisperDrive(tm) will continue to meet your needs."
EDIT: I also think WD should be publishing thermal characteristics, not just "watts used".
> The lower frequency makes it both less loud to the human ear and subjectively less "annoying"
Exactly. The difference can be huge, even if the number of "dB" measured are the same, to the point that one would not recognize the noise of one running HD, whereas another could be extremely irritating.
There is an exact reason why: the curve of perception limits of our ears is not a horizontal line but a curve, where the higher power of the tone is needed when moving to the lower frequencies.
The proper reporting of the noise levels would therefore be a noise histogram, or at least should include the frequency of the peak level and not be just a single number if one'd want to compare how irritating the noise is. And even a single histogram can miss the time component, as the noise with the main peak level at some frequency can also come in the waves, making it even more irritating, basically, the histogram of the histogram could also be needed to tell you what's going on.
Moreover, the said "equal-loudness contour" is not exactly the same for different listeners, and as a result different listeners could hear the same noise sources differently. E.g. my girlfriend and I hear the same noise sources (emitting different levels of noise over different frequencies) completely different.
In short, not having precise histograms and analysis simple "is it 5400 RPM" was a really useful information to know the expected noise characteristic of a HD. It's not an accident that these two became two different speeds with the expected use in different environments.
I've intentionally bought 5400RPM disks whenever it wasn't for some servers locked in the server rooms.
Edit (answering "floatingatoll"'s comment below): All the above should be an argument that: "“are they essentially silent from a few feet away”, which is often simple to answer given a drive to test" is not something that has the same answer for everybody. If I'm hearing the lower frequencies better than you, what is "essentially silent" for you can be very annoying for me, and that's why I'd need 5400RPM where you could tolerate 7200RPM. It's also an argument that the proper measurement could indeed be made to know what will be irritating for which person, but it's not common to be present even in the reviews, even less in the specs of the manufacturer. Which is again not surprising, as the frequency histograms sadly aren't common even in the reviews of the music equipment. Common consumers indeed prefer some simple "yes/no" verdicts ("is it quiet" enough), like the one
"floatingatoll" below proposes. But such statements just aren't the answer usable for everyone -- that's anyway why the number for noise level is reported. But it's not enough. I know it firsthand, as I personally do hear better low level sounds than many people around me. What's "quiet" for them is "irritating noise" for me.
These are definitely the right questions to be asking about the sounds of hard drives, regardless of their RPM. My most important question is subjective: “are they essentially silent from a few feet away”, which is often simple to answer given a drive to test — but difficult to learn from specs and frequency charts alone.
That means that for the same reported noise level of e.g. 30dB a 5400RPM drive is much more quiet for humans than a 7200RPM drive.
That is how the people recognized that these HDs aren't 5400RPM -- they sounded "too loud" so they took the sample of the noise and drawing the histogram they proved that the peak was at 120Hz.
As far as I know, nobody managed to produce a 7200RPM drive which does not have a peak at 120Hz. If you know some that doesn't have such characteristic, please write, everybody will celebrate that achievement.
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.
The ISP is also in the best position to publish the p50, p90 and p99 speeds their customers reach. But why bother, when they can feign ignorance and just talk about what the boffins in the Science Lab say it should be.
Perhaps, with tongue in cheek, we could call this the p0 speed — as in it doesn’t make sense and it’s guaranteed that 0% of customers achieve it.
Percentiles are not helpful, because at least in my home country what degrades the maximum potential speed is the influence that parallel copper cables have on each other. So my internet speed depends on how much my neighbours are using the internet.
It's really really difficult to predict this statistically.
OTOH, there's a guaranteed minimum speed the ISP has to deliver.
There's no "may" about it: they are oversubscribed for consumers so as to get the price points down.
If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.
This varies wildly by location and company. Approximately half my family is subscribed to Cox, and the other half mostly to Spectrum. The Cox connections never drop below 80% of their advertised speeds and the Spectrum ones rarely rise above 50%. Huge swaths of Spectrum's service area are so resource-starved they don't rise above 10% of their advertised speeds during daylight hours.
IMO, there should be some regulation where they should be forced to mention the current and maximum allocation that they are willing to make as well as the average/median bandwidth that the active users enjoy per hour.
The UK has a rule which requires ISPs to only advertise speeds achievable by 50% of users during peak periods. Customers are also allowed to leave contracts without penalty if ISPs are unable or unwilling to provide advertised speeds to the end user[0].
Such rules are not within the American Overton window for the usual reasons.
Germany has a website that lets you automatically file a complaint if your provider doesn't reach 90% of the advertised speed in measurements over two days
> If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.
You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable. Cheaper than colocation, even.
If you get in touch with the right department, you would typically have to sign a multi year contract with the net value due upfront in case of termination to get them to run the fiber to you. Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.
> Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.
The community of Ammon, ID, built their own municipal fibre network because of this:
> It all began about seven years ago when the city government, suffering from horrible upload speeds, wanted a dedicated 100Mbps circuit between City Hall and the Public Works building, less than a mile apart. Qwest (now CenturyLink) didn't want the project, while Cable One offered to do it for a start-up fee of $80,000 plus $1,000 a month, Patterson said.
At this year's (virtual) NLNOG there was presentation from a fellow who was fed up with slow Internet options in his rural Michigan county and so setup his own ISP by having fibre optic pulled to his house and then redistributing service to his neighbours:
Only as far as the first bottleneck though - if 1000 customers in a neighborhood pay for 1Gbps connections, that doesnt mean the neighborhood actually has 1Tbps of capacity to the wider internet. Its probably a tenth of that at best, even in well connected areas.
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.
Yes, I do. I have lived in several different areas where I had no problems getting the full advertised speed at any given time (on peak, off peak, etc.).
I think the biggest reason they say "up to" is because a lot of poeple get a cheap $40 router that can't support that the advertised speed. Heck, I just moved into a new place that gives symmetric gigabit speeds. I had to replace my router to actually get one that can handle the advertised speeds (I had an APU1d4 with realtek ethernet ports that saturated at 300 Mb/s). My older laptop does not even have wired nor wireless speeds that can handle the connection.
So while I am no fan of a lot of ISPs, I completely understand why they say "up to", they don't want to deal with folks who say they don't get their advertised speeds while using a $200 laptop and a $40 router.
I've had pretty good luck with DSL providers in three locations in the bay area and one in washington state. Sync speeds have always been at the top of the range, and usually upload/download speed to real destinations is consistent with the sync speed. Depends on the destination of course. And a lot of people on DSL have poor outside wiring (or it's just a long distance) and don't get great sync speeds or the lose sync when it rains and the lines get wet, etc. Mostly though, outside of exceptional circumstances the DSL data rates are slow enough that the bottleneck is either the individual subscriber's line (outdoor and indoor), their equipment, or wifi problems.
When I was on ATT gigabit fiber in San Jose, it was hard to confirm the speeds, but they would vary a lot more. I think most of the time at peak I would only see 400 Mbps down, but closer to the line speed off-peak. Upstream was more consistent.
Cox Communications doesn't have the best availability record with me (1-2 hour complete connection failures in the middle of the night every month or two) but as far as speeds go they're almost always exactly as advertised.
I do. (Frontier FIOS, Southern California) I pay for 150Mb/s up/down and always get those speeds, even at peak times. (I don't get the full speed on my wireless devices, 100BaseT ethernet devices, or network over USB 2.0 devices) I pay $90-$95 per month. (this is a residential ISP, not a commercial one. Commercial ISPs typically have a SLA and "up to" is well defined in the contract if it's applicable at all.)
Every time I've tested it my AT&T Fiber 300Mbit symmetrical connection gave me pretty close (if not more) than 300mb upload and download. Speed is also high enough that I have to test on LAN for it to be reliable, as just one wall can cause my WiFi to drop below the maximum speed of the service (of course, I'm using my own AP not the terrible one built into the provided modem).
I'm on spectrum in a high-tier US city and can regularly achieve a number very close to my cap (400mbs) throughout the day.
Granted, before my current router I was only hitting just over 50% of the rated speed. But that turned out to be the router I was using, its CPU was not fast enough or something. With a new router and all wired connections between me and the 'net, I get the speeds I pay for.
Long ago an ISP sold me on VDSL for the office as "up to 55/3 Mbit/s". After install I notice they had deployed ADSL equipment with a theoretical maximum throughput of 12/1.3 Mbit/s. They claimed that this was ok and tried to hide behind the "up to" clause.
If you're buying no-name brands off Amazon with no certification, they may very well be lying to you. But "60W equivalent" is still a metric with a specific meaning, whether or not a particular shitty company is lying to you about it.
Maybe we need an independent "this spec sheet isn't full of bullshit" certification for hard drives.
"Equivalent RPM" would make sense for something where there was actually an equivalence. Like if a drive had two sets of heads (halving the seek time), or if an SSD called itself a 20krpm equivalent or something. This is just straight up lying about a standard metric.
It is, and that's the point: you can screw a 60W equivalent LED into any socket where you previously had a 60W incandescent and have about the same amount of light for a much lower energy cost.
You'd think so. But I've seen LEDs that are kind of like spotlights and they market them as the wattage based on the brightness under the spotlight not the total lumens it produces.
Only in the fine print do they disclose how many actual lumens.
So why not use the actual measurement that the customer is interested in: The light quantity? Power consumption (W) seems to be the wrong measurement since you're comparing apples to oranges.
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”.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That is true, especially if you're in a position like AMD is where they can sell every single good chip they get into a high margin server part (which is why ryzen can be scarce). But that's pretty rare overall. As a process node matures, the amount of perfect dies will go up dramatically, but there will certainly be no price drop to compensate.
It's also true in many IBM mainframe computers for decades. Usually a lot of hardware is installed but disabled by software, an upgrade by a field technician is just the process of entering a license key. Same for many electronic test instruments, sometimes it's possible to "upgrade" the cheapest 100 MHz oscilloscope in a product line to the most expensive 500 MHz model [0] by an undocumented backdoor, EEPROM hacking, or a keygen. Extra features can also be unlocked. Interestingly, since the manufacturers' revenues come from selling to enterprise users under service contracts, they usually don't care about a hardware hackers or two on the web at all.
[0] Of course it's a possibility that the analog front-end and ADC is still binned for performance or populated with different components, so you need a bit luck here if you want matched performance.
Reminds of the Casio calculator. I don't remember the specifics, but a cheaper model is actually exactly the same as the more expensive one. They cut off a connection of the circuit board to disable the advanced functions. All you have to do is to connect the cut wires with a pencil stroke, and the calculator is "upgraded".
> 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.
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.
While I'll admit they do have a slightly better case here, basically every OS's definition is more important than the SI. They clearly did it to make their drives look bigger. As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones?
kB, MB, GB, etc. were genuinely ill-defined when the drive manufacturers started using them to their advantage. Those units were not standardized by SI or ISO, there was precedent for both the binary and decimal interpretations, the unambiguously binary KiB, MiB, etc. had not yet been introduced, and industry standards organizations like JEDEC and IEC were not particularly helpful in resolving the situation.
None of those mitigating/confounding factors apply to RPM, so the current lies are more blatant.
(Though it does seem somewhat relevant to point out here that a "500GB" drive usually has an accessible capacity of 500,107,862,016 bytes, implying an effective definition of 1GB=1,000,215,724 bytes, which is neither 1024^3 bytes nor 10^9, nor 10^9 rounded up to the nearest whole (binary-sized) sector. And that effective GB definition varies with drive capacity.)
I haven't actually been able to verify with multiple 500GB hard drives, but the exact byte count I quoted does seem to be universally standard for 500GB SSDs.
More like what they did with the "X" value of CDROM drives. 1X, 2X, 3X, etc. It started out being a rough multiple of the expected data rate. Eventually manufacturers realized they could change it to measure something else (I think rotational speed or something) so they could inflate the "X" value more and more without a corresponding increased data rate for the user. This will inevitably happen when you let marketing define your units or there is no regulatory body enforcing basic truth in advertising.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seagate mea culpa'd afterwards, but they still tried to pull the same crap with SMR until they were caught.
There's an order or two of magnitude less data and benchmarks on the Toshiba drives, but I just bought Toshiba 6x6TBs for a NAS build because I couldn't stomach buying WD or Seagate (or HGST which is just WD now).
EDIT: Forgot to say, the drives have been great. It's only been 6 months or so, but they've been performant, no bad sectors yet.
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.
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?
They're not going to be sitting in the board room panicking about the at most few ten thousand sales to DIY enthusiasts they're losing. Especially not with shipments declining by ten or so million per year.
Why not get an external hard drive and shuck it? You end up paying half the price, but the drive is still the same (although you have to pay attention to reviews on /r/DataHoarder). The only disadvantage is the lack of warranty and having to shuck it.
After a lot of deliberation I finally decided to shuck and got 2 8tb WD elements from Amazon and 2 8tb WD easystore from Best Buy. Shucking was extremely easy. They all had the same WD white drive inside.
However, the difference was not in just branding which to me was surprising. In Elements the drive is held by rubber brackets which won’t fit in non-WD drives, but Easystore is using rubberized screws, which allowed me to use the case with older Seagates.
They do run hot in the external case. I was trying to run badblocks and when the temp became about 60C, I decided to run an external fan. I wonder how long do these drives last in these external cases..
In my NAS with fans, the highest it got was 49C
Some WD external drives will hang the boot process if the host computer probes the drive for bootability. These drives will even stop the host computer from booting if they're connected via USB, much less if they're directly connected.
Some USB external drives have the USB controller embedded on the drive PCB and don't provide an accessible SATA interface.
Emphasis on _some_. This type of behaviour is more common on the compact 2.5" type external drives.
As of writing this comment, big external drives still come with 3.5" hard drives, with the only caveat being that some require you to disable the 3.3V rail on your SATA connector, either by cutting the wire or taping some pins on your HDD with kapton tape. Without the workaround some of these shucked drives will not power up properly when connected to a SATA power plug that also provides 3.3V.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>You cannot just run a drive at a different RPM (except for idling, different RPM while reading/writing requires different read head calibrations and glide height, etc.).
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).
Eh. Or any kind of complex module/system like a laptop. I will agree that desktop hardware tends to be decent to shop for if you’re not trying to be a complete cheapskate. I built a desktop just like most other people during the lockdown and it wasn’t as bad as buying laptops trained me to expect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mustang owners might be an exception but I would be upset if I was hypothetically sold a V8 Toyota Camry when expecting a four-cylinder, even if I only paid the lower price.
I have a very standard commute where I drive boring and defensively. I enjoy cars as much as they get me from point A to B. There would be no benefit for me spending extra money despite the "better" engine.
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.
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
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
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...
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?