Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by chrisseaton on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:14PM (#24403721)

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.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by AnssiH on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:36PM (#24403823)

> 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.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by smnrchrds on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:45PM (#24403865)

> 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?

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by AnssiH on Monday September 07, 2020 @09:44PM (#24404505)

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.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by murgindrag on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:49PM (#24403897)

Well, I'm looking for a 19dB-class hard drive. That class spans anything between 14dB and 60dB. That's the general noise class, you know.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by ksec on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @08:07AM (#24407589)

Wondering why this isn't the top Comment.

Personally the only metric I care about now on HDD is reliability.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by dawnerd on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:18PM (#24403741)

Couldn’t they just software limit the speed? I’m sure they thought of it but it seems on the surface like an easy problem to solve for.

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by gruez on Monday September 07, 2020 @09:52PM (#24404550)

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ikk0rv/psa_mul...

>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.).

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Re:Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM” by wmf on Monday September 07, 2020 @09:41PM (#24404482)

Drives don't support this; they're designed to operate at a single fixed RPM.

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