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".

decibels isn't the main advantage of 5400 over 7200. The lower frequency makes it both less loud to the human ear and subjectively less "annoying"

> 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.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

Knowing that: 5400RPM == 90Hz; 7200RPM == 120Hz

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.

> regardless of their RPM.

It's not regardless:

5400RPM == 90Hz

7200RPM == 120Hz

The human perception curve shows that the humans hear much better the sounds at 120Hz than at 90Hz,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

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.

I made such a drive. I just took a stock 7200 rpm drive and added a 90Hz buzzer.

> I just took a stock 7200 rpm drive and added a 90Hz buzzer.

Congratulations: Your idea is both technically possible and completely useless in practice.

> 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").

That's illegal where I live, the primary connection speed figure used in advertisements must be the average speed users in the real world experience.

Turns out that consumer protection laws are pretty useful.

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.

This is really interesting, thank you. Do you have a link to some good info on the phenomenon?

It also includes the fact that their network may be oversubscribed.

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.

[0] https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ask-our-expert/broadband-...

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.

> You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable.

Assuming you can easily get hooked up at a residential address. Perhaps if you live in an apartment/condo tower, then fibre may have already been run:

* https://www.fibrestream.ca/locations

Some random house, on some random street? Unlikely.

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.

* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...

* https://www.ammonfiber.com

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:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

Only if you want a complete rack or more at a colo facility.

If you get half a rack or less, that tends to be (quite a bit) cheaper.

I have both, and I think the break even point is probably paying for around 7 or 8U.

They have total control over your connection's speed, particularly when they mandate you use their equipment.

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.

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

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.

Many ISPs provide that level (or more) of performance, even during peak hours.

https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/mba/images/2018/chart1.png https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

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.

Just did a Speedtest, 880mbps down and 780Mbps up at 19:30, so peak.

Sonic gigabit in SF. I’d say that’s within margin of error. I see 900s on the early AM. Plus my WiFi can’t go that fast so I’m ok with it.

Would be nice if the pricing then corresponded to performance statistics.

Yes, even during peak hours.

The worst case ever:

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.

60 watt equivalent light bulb

That's a useful metric though, it means "produces about as much light as a 60W incandescent light bulb"

And if you're buying products with Energy Star certification, they have to meet a specific output requirement to claim an equivalent wattage: https://www.energystar.gov/products/lighting_fans/light_bulb...

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.

I thought that based on the amount of lumens it produces

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.

Not everywhere -- LEDs aren't always dimmer switch compatible, and mismatched bulbs on a shared circuit will have weird interactions.

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.

Are they just basing it on lumens? There might be more interplay, i.e. if you can get by with fewer lumens if you emit in a different wavelength.

DAT Tape nTB (uncompressed data)