Western Digital Is Trying to Fool You

bigdogchris

bigdogchris

Fully [H]
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
Messages
18,704
Funny.

Aren't SSDs way lower power than their 5400 RPM Green drives anyway? So I don't really get those.
 
Aren't SSDs way lower power than their 5400 RPM Green drives anyway?
Click to expand...

Most SSDs are lower power. Some like the Intel 750 actually use more power than spinners when active but in either case you can not buy a 2TB SSD for anywhere near $55 US.
 
zzz said:
Funny.

Aren't SSDs way lower power than their 5400 RPM Green drives anyway? So I don't really get those.
Click to expand...

High storage capacity for a very low cost.
You get what you pay for, though...
 
Western Digital suggests that the best way to do so is look at the last letter in the model number: if it's "X", you're getting a 7,200 RPM drive; but if it's "Z", it's going to be 5,400 RPM.
Click to expand...

if only they had different colors to differentiate instead... like, maybe 5400 could be.. I dunno, green? idiots

not that I care I only buy HGST at this point
 
Well first they hidden the rpm behind IntelliPower which is just a marketing way of not wanting to say they are 5400rpm-class drives. In fact they were so vague in the beginning that many people including reviewsites interpreted this as having a variable RPM. No such drive exists - all drives have a static RPM while they are in operating mode. Only some drive exists that have a spindown setting where their rpm is lowered but not to 0 (i.e. full spindown). But no drive i know of can actually operate with shifting rpm, only a static RPM.

With consumers knowing Green stands for 5400rpm, they are trying to increase the obfuscation by having both 5400rpm and 7200rpm under the Blue banner, which always stood for 7200rpm.

The funny thing is that.. in this era, you want the rpm actually to be as low as possible because today harddrives are used for mass storage. We have SSDs to give us IOps, harddrives are becoming tapestreamers basically, only good for sequential I/O thus mass storage. For mass storage, you want low rpm and high data density. Because performance increases with higher data density due to higher sector-per-track density - i.e. the read/write head will cover more sectors each revolution. Increasing the rpm is the opposite and is just a 'dumb' way to increase performance, like overclocking your processor or GPU while more cores is the smarter way because it consumes much less power. With increasing the rpm, you get about 20% extra performance for 50% more power.

My ideal drive would be 3600 - 4200rpm so very low power, but will have excessively high data density paired with much higher ECC overhead. This will result in a very high capacity (>10TB) drive with very good performance (300MB/s+) that consumes virtually no power, has very low vibrations, noise and might actually be much more reliable because of the lower spindle speed there would be less wear and less chance for things to go wrong.

But marketing will decide what products are for sale, not technical arguments. So the above is only my dream and will not turn into reality. The reality will be that mechanical storage will soon be replaced by solid state storage for the majority. The higher price of SSDs will soon reach a point where it is not so much higher per TB of storage any more and people will consider having all SSD storage, even for mass storage. This then could lead to a snow ball effect where the reduced sales of mechanical storage leads to higher prices which only accelerates the exodus of mechanical storage, leaving it to a niche like cloud storage providers and other users who require the lowest price per TB.

The point has long passed where 3,5" HDDs are actually lowering in shipping volume (units sold), only 2,5" HDDs were growing, and i looked at the stats many years ago so i am interested to know whether the trend of 5 years ago still holds true. Laptops today often have no mechanical storage any longer, only SSD.
 
Cipher, I totally agree. Marketing unfortunately often decides. Years ago I bought an external HDD for backup and preferred 5400RPM since it should be more reliable (and of course I bought WD, not Seagate or Samsung...but Hitachi is also excellent).
 
Spinners are still good when editing videos, at least at the consumer level. You want a healthy amount of space and relatively good performance. Some HDD's in RAID 0 will do that. And it's far less cost prohibitive then a large SSD.

two 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 will do quite well for video editing and the price can be in the $100-$200 range.
 
Had crap luck with green and blue series drives for years. Really like the blacks and some of the reds though.
 
Red and Green are physically the same drive, only a tiny vibration sensor is what separates them physically. The Red has minor firmware tweaks (TLER enabled + different headparking setting) and it has additional warranty: 3 years instead of 2 years in the EU or instead of 1 years outside of the EU.

The Red Pro is physically different though, and it operates at 7200rpm instead of ~5400rpm.

Personally, i think people buying WD Black should buy an SSD instead. High seek power and high rpm is not that relevant any longer in this era, because SSDs totally own IOps performance and harddrives are only viable as mass storage for most users. Mass storage does not require high IOps and thus low rpm and low seek power are better suited for this type of storage.
 
Mech drives are just for large data dumps now. Just buy on size to price ratio.

Speed is mostly irrelevant in that case. I think this is WD's reaction to that. Why bother splitting them up when all they will do is host movies, MP3s and JPEGS? Certainly wouldn't bother buying a WD Black these days. That's the model that should be discontinued really.
 
Last edited:
I've had great luck with the Black drives. Even in RAID. I have six of the 1TB drives at home and several of those are on the test bench. I've had some Green drives now for a year or so and those have worked fine.
 
no issues with original 1tb blacks in my drobo and my mediavault rig. They were purchased before WD decided to go all stingy and block changes to tler, so I hope none die anytime soon. I had one early gen 1tb green go bad recently.. but it was running 24/7 for years
 
that is indeed shady, to me it looks like an obvious ploy to sell blue drives to consumers who will assume they 7200rpm when they not.

My green doesnt feel any slower than my WD red tho. Although both do feel slower than my WD black.
 
chrcoluk said:
that is indeed shady, to me it looks like an obvious ploy to sell blue drives to consumers who will assume they 7200rpm when they not.

My green doesnt feel any slower than my WD red tho. Although both do feel slower than my WD black.
Click to expand...

I don't even notice how slow the greens are, but like you I can certainly tell the difference when using the black drives.
 
_CiPHER_ said:
Well first they hidden the rpm behind IntelliPower which is just a marketing way of not wanting to say they are 5400rpm-class drives. In fact they were so vague in the beginning that many people including reviewsites interpreted this as having a variable RPM. No such drive exists - all drives have a static RPM while they are in operating mode. Only some drive exists that have a spindown setting where their rpm is lowered but not to 0 (i.e. full spindown). But no drive i know of can actually operate with shifting rpm, only a static RPM.

With consumers knowing Green stands for 5400rpm, they are trying to increase the obfuscation by having both 5400rpm and 7200rpm under the Blue banner, which always stood for 7200rpm.

The funny thing is that.. in this era, you want the rpm actually to be as low as possible because today harddrives are used for mass storage. We have SSDs to give us IOps, harddrives are becoming tapestreamers basically, only good for sequential I/O thus mass storage. For mass storage, you want low rpm and high data density. Because performance increases with higher data density due to higher sector-per-track density - i.e. the read/write head will cover more sectors each revolution. Increasing the rpm is the opposite and is just a 'dumb' way to increase performance, like overclocking your processor or GPU while more cores is the smarter way because it consumes much less power. With increasing the rpm, you get about 20% extra performance for 50% more power.

My ideal drive would be 3600 - 4200rpm so very low power, but will have excessively high data density paired with much higher ECC overhead. This will result in a very high capacity (>10TB) drive with very good performance (300MB/s+) that consumes virtually no power, has very low vibrations, noise and might actually be much more reliable because of the lower spindle speed there would be less wear and less chance for things to go wrong.

But marketing will decide what products are for sale, not technical arguments. So the above is only my dream and will not turn into reality. The reality will be that mechanical storage will soon be replaced by solid state storage for the majority. The higher price of SSDs will soon reach a point where it is not so much higher per TB of storage any more and people will consider having all SSD storage, even for mass storage. This then could lead to a snow ball effect where the reduced sales of mechanical storage leads to higher prices which only accelerates the exodus of mechanical storage, leaving it to a niche like cloud storage providers and other users who require the lowest price per TB.

The point has long passed where 3,5" HDDs are actually lowering in shipping volume (units sold), only 2,5" HDDs were growing, and i looked at the stats many years ago so i am interested to know whether the trend of 5 years ago still holds true. Laptops today often have no mechanical storage any longer, only SSD.
Click to expand...

Great post man, thanks for going into the detail. Full agree that a slower speed quiet/non-vibrating large dense drive would rule for desktop storage.
 
its like people are completely oblivious to how WD and now HGST raise prices by rebranding
 
TypeRazor said:
its like people are completely oblivious to how WD and now HGST raise prices by rebranding
Click to expand...

Everyone is doing it. I bought this drive, you'll notice there is a "newer" version which is the same drive just more expensive and lower warranty.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
_CiPHER_ said:
The funny thing is that.. in this era, you want the rpm actually to be as low as possible because today harddrives are used for mass storage.

My ideal drive would be 3600 - 4200rpm so very low power, but will have excessively high data density paired with much higher ECC overhead. This will result in a very high capacity (>10TB) drive with very good performance (300MB/s+) that consumes virtually no power, has very low vibrations, noise and might actually be much more reliable because of the lower spindle speed there would be less wear and less chance for things to go wrong.

But marketing will decide what products are for sale, not technical arguments. So the above is only my dream and will not turn into reality. The reality will be that mechanical storage will soon be replaced by solid state storage for the majority. The higher price of SSDs will soon reach a point where it is not so much higher per TB of storage any more and people will consider having all SSD storage, even for mass storage. This then could lead to a snow ball effect where the reduced sales of mechanical storage leads to higher prices which only accelerates the exodus of mechanical storage, leaving it to a niche like cloud storage providers and other users who require the lowest price per TB.
Click to expand...

Well low power is great but it wont increase track density as that depends on the size of the head which already only uses a few electrons. Digital media can use varying speeds using CAV and CLV to store more data because they use lasers. But even there the limit is how long the groves have to be for it to reflect the photons onto the detector. At this stage DSP's are fast enough that speed does not matter. They can have 15K RPM drives but they would hold the same amount of data as a 5400 RPM drive. The size of the bit on the platter would be the same. Hence why they have to use multi layer.. But how do you place multi layers on magnetic media? All the tricks now is to use tracks which are close together overlapping each other to pack more bits into more tracks in the same area. SMR.. We might have come to the EOL for magnetic media already.. So now it is only costs that decrease and maybe lower power as well. I highly doubt we would see 20TB hard drives. All the larger HD's now use more platters and SMR not higher density as such. So we are now back again to digital media.. Maybe like holographic memory or vertical nand where you can store 500 layers on a die and it will be almost the same size of the chips we currently have. Rotating magnetic media cant do that.
 
I'm still running my 2TB Black from 4 yrs ago. It's still a great, reliable data dump.
 
TypeRazor said:
its like people are completely oblivious to how WD and now HGST raise prices by rebranding
Click to expand...

the WD and HGST drives are different... hell they don't even look similar... unless something has changed?
 
I am curious why they would do this when SSD are rated for less power consumption.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top