14 ms·

Multiple Western Digital 5400RPM drives are actually 7200RPM drives

131 points by hosteur 6y ago

hosteur 6y ago
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."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rbinv 6y ago
  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
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    7200 RPM drives indeed have faster access (in terms of seek latency) and higher sustained throughput but, heat and power is not simple variables as one might think. Especially RED drives are marketed for NAS systems (from home to SMB size). When a drives are installed into a closure, things like power and thermal budget comes into play. NAS boxes are designed with strict limits and if they cannot cool themselves (and the drives) off or cannot supply the required power to drives; data corruption, performance/life span degradation may occur. In extreme cases (with large storage arrays) calculated overall power budget can skew and may cause blackouts in some parts of the data center. There's a presumed ~2W difference in power consumption between 5.4K and 7.2K drives. We can safely install 60 of them in a 4U enclosure today. If we add 4 enclosures to a rack, that creates a ~480W difference, which is a one HPC server or 2-3 low-load, 1U or 2U servers. This is indeed significant. While some of these drives are in MyBook enclosures, REDs may end up in very different places and may cause problems. In that case, head or spindle noise is not even the smallest concern. If we're talking about noise, continuous (spindle) noise is much more degrading than head/seek noise. For me, even benign noises like USB fans have much more noticable effects after the day than mechanical keyboard noise for example.
    - ballenf 6y ago
      > There's a presumed ~2W difference in power consumption between 5.4K and 7.2K drives. Is that purely extra friction due to higher speed? Or is it spin up from sleep needing more power?
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        If we consider WD80EFAX [0], which is one of the suspect drives, that figure is for idle power consumption where disk is spinning but heads are not doing anything. So, that difference is for sustaining higher spindle speeds. The peak power requirement is 1.79A (~21.5W) which is probably consumed when starting from full-stop state (stand-by, sleep or power-off where motor is turned off). [0]: https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149-eng_spec_data_sheet_2879-800002.pdf https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149... [0]: https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.pdf https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.p...
  - noisem4ker 6y ago
    Why would rotation speed inversely affect head noise?
    - rbinv 6y ago
      Yeah, I came to the same conclusion after thinking about it some more. Looks like a faulty memory.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      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.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Hmm, that app actually is pretty neat. It's published (for free, and under GPL) by the University of Aachen to support physics experiments. Recommended, at least from what I've seen so far.
- unixhero 6y ago
  This is true. Sometimes a 5400 rpm drive is desired.
- bonchicbongenre 6y ago
  For what it's worth, phyphox also has an android app. It's pretty good; my favorite app to play with on a flight
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    The data from this tool is fascinating! When you run the Acceleration Spectrum experiment there's a history view that makes a 120hz vibration extremely trivial to see.
- bzb5 6y ago
  I’ve tried the app approach, but I don’t know how to interpret the data. Can someone lend a hand?
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  You could just use a microphone and record it’s sound. You will see different frequency modes depending on the RPM.
  - hosteur 6y ago
    > You could just use a microphone and record it’s sound. You will see different frequency modes depending on the RPM. Yes, I believe this is what Phyphox does for you. Most people have a microphone in their smartphone. But of course you could use a dedicated microphone and do a frequency analysis yourself instead.
- quercusa 6y ago
  > phyphox Well, there goes my productivity for the day. (edit: fixed typo)
tenbino 6y ago
I would have thought giving a customer a faster than spec product isn’t a terrible sin.
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  It matters because they don't give you what they said they would in the specs.
  - ender341341 6y ago
    It's also becoming a habit for them to miss-label drives (see smr)
- beagle3 6y ago
  It is when it blows through your power budget and heating budget. Also, some array performance degraded significantly when using different speed drives, to much below the slowest drive (that’s not common anymore, but used to be an issue and might still be in some setups)
- bserge 6y ago
  If I bought the drive for active work, yeah I'd probably be happy about the speed for the price (IF they don't artificially limit the speed!). But if I buy these for NAS/backups, I want them to be quiet, cool and longer lasting - in my experience 5400 RPM drives do heat less and last longer than 7200 RPM. Not sure if they still do, but WDs had this IntelliPark feature, which slammed the heads into parking a few times a minute (because otherwise your drive would last a decade, I guess), and their 7200rpm drives were clicking so loud I often thought "that's it, it failed". But no, just "normal" operation... So I'd rather get the specs I'm paying for.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  It matters because I tend to choose 5400rpm for bulk storage - for power and longevity reasons, mostly.
- bragh 6y ago
  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.
uptown 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > USB hdd have dedicated controllers with direct usb bridge In my (limited) experience, it's mostly the WD portables that have a direct USB connector. It's been going on for many years — I have a WD Passport with USB 2.0 that I've unsuccessfully tried to shuck. The portable Seagate Backup drives are shuckable, but some of them are SMR.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  I've done this and didn't even realize it was a thing.
- crtasm 6y ago
  I don't think anyone's dedicated to shucking in itself, they just want to save money and help others do the same by sharing information.
mayama 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Those would be 5400rpm drives maybe 7200rpm capable), then, not 7200rpm.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
gsnedders 6y ago
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?
- kasabali 6y ago
  That's simply not possible. Tolerances are too tight on a modern drive.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Can HDs be (safely and effectively) slowed down by the user, with appropriate drivers? If not, why not?
- hn_acc_2 6y ago
  No, the drive motor rpm is not controlled by OS drivers but by the drive controller. You'd have to write custom firmware and flash it onto the drive controller (inside the HDD) to change the rpm
- toast0 6y ago
  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.
drtillberg 6y ago
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.

131 points by hosteur 6y ago

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."

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rbinv 6y ago
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
- bayindirh 6y ago
  7200 RPM drives indeed have faster access (in terms of seek latency) and higher sustained throughput but, heat and power is not simple variables as one might think. Especially RED drives are marketed for NAS systems (from home to SMB size). When a drives are installed into a closure, things like power and thermal budget comes into play. NAS boxes are designed with strict limits and if they cannot cool themselves (and the drives) off or cannot supply the required power to drives; data corruption, performance/life span degradation may occur. In extreme cases (with large storage arrays) calculated overall power budget can skew and may cause blackouts in some parts of the data center. There's a presumed ~2W difference in power consumption between 5.4K and 7.2K drives. We can safely install 60 of them in a 4U enclosure today. If we add 4 enclosures to a rack, that creates a ~480W difference, which is a one HPC server or 2-3 low-load, 1U or 2U servers. This is indeed significant. While some of these drives are in MyBook enclosures, REDs may end up in very different places and may cause problems. In that case, head or spindle noise is not even the smallest concern. If we're talking about noise, continuous (spindle) noise is much more degrading than head/seek noise. For me, even benign noises like USB fans have much more noticable effects after the day than mechanical keyboard noise for example.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    > There's a presumed ~2W difference in power consumption between 5.4K and 7.2K drives. Is that purely extra friction due to higher speed? Or is it spin up from sleep needing more power?
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      If we consider WD80EFAX [0], which is one of the suspect drives, that figure is for idle power consumption where disk is spinning but heads are not doing anything. So, that difference is for sustaining higher spindle speeds. The peak power requirement is 1.79A (~21.5W) which is probably consumed when starting from full-stop state (stand-by, sleep or power-off where motor is turned off). [0]: https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149-eng_spec_data_sheet_2879-800002.pdf https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-3805661149... [0]: https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.pdf https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.p...
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  Why would rotation speed inversely affect head noise?
  - rbinv 6y ago
    Yeah, I came to the same conclusion after thinking about it some more. Looks like a faulty memory.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    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.
CamperBob2 6y ago
Hmm, that app actually is pretty neat. It's published (for free, and under GPL) by the University of Aachen to support physics experiments. Recommended, at least from what I've seen so far.
unixhero 6y ago
This is true. Sometimes a 5400 rpm drive is desired.
bonchicbongenre 6y ago
For what it's worth, phyphox also has an android app. It's pretty good; my favorite app to play with on a flight
- bentcorner 6y ago
  The data from this tool is fascinating! When you run the Acceleration Spectrum experiment there's a history view that makes a 120hz vibration extremely trivial to see.
bzb5 6y ago
I’ve tried the app approach, but I don’t know how to interpret the data. Can someone lend a hand?
heavenlyblue 6y ago
You could just use a microphone and record it’s sound. You will see different frequency modes depending on the RPM.
- hosteur 6y ago
  > You could just use a microphone and record it’s sound. You will see different frequency modes depending on the RPM. Yes, I believe this is what Phyphox does for you. Most people have a microphone in their smartphone. But of course you could use a dedicated microphone and do a frequency analysis yourself instead.
quercusa 6y ago
> phyphox Well, there goes my productivity for the day. (edit: fixed typo)

tenbino 6y ago

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

RealStickman_ 6y ago
It matters because they don't give you what they said they would in the specs.
- ender341341 6y ago
  It's also becoming a habit for them to miss-label drives (see smr)
beagle3 6y ago
It is when it blows through your power budget and heating budget. Also, some array performance degraded significantly when using different speed drives, to much below the slowest drive (that’s not common anymore, but used to be an issue and might still be in some setups)
bserge 6y ago
If I bought the drive for active work, yeah I'd probably be happy about the speed for the price (IF they don't artificially limit the speed!). But if I buy these for NAS/backups, I want them to be quiet, cool and longer lasting - in my experience 5400 RPM drives do heat less and last longer than 7200 RPM. Not sure if they still do, but WDs had this IntelliPark feature, which slammed the heads into parking a few times a minute (because otherwise your drive would last a decade, I guess), and their 7200rpm drives were clicking so loud I often thought "that's it, it failed". But no, just "normal" operation... So I'd rather get the specs I'm paying for.
mschuster91 6y ago
It matters because I tend to choose 5400rpm for bulk storage - for power and longevity reasons, mostly.
bragh 6y ago
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.

uptown 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > USB hdd have dedicated controllers with direct usb bridge In my (limited) experience, it's mostly the WD portables that have a direct USB connector. It's been going on for many years — I have a WD Passport with USB 2.0 that I've unsuccessfully tried to shuck. The portable Seagate Backup drives are shuckable, but some of them are SMR.
jnwatson 6y ago
I've done this and didn't even realize it was a thing.
crtasm 6y ago
I don't think anyone's dedicated to shucking in itself, they just want to save money and help others do the same by sharing information.

mayama 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Those would be 5400rpm drives maybe 7200rpm capable), then, not 7200rpm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

gsnedders 6y ago

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?

kasabali 6y ago
That's simply not possible. Tolerances are too tight on a modern drive.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

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

hn_acc_2 6y ago
No, the drive motor rpm is not controlled by OS drivers but by the drive controller. You'd have to write custom firmware and flash it onto the drive controller (inside the HDD) to change the rpm
toast0 6y ago
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.

drtillberg 6y ago

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.