WD Caviar GP 1 TB SATA Hard Drives (WD10EACS) spin speed

[quest_for_silence]

can we please take any discussion about the WD 1GP RPM speed offline

I've talked with WD's customer support a couple of times more after your straight answer.

The below quoted state are definitely WD's last one (or so I hope) on this argument.

Response (James W.) 10/29/2007 06:39 AM
The motor inside the drives is 7200 RPM, but it also spins at 5400 RPM to save power when it is not being accessed. It is dynamically adujusted while working. That is what I meant when I said it spins down to 5400 RPM dynamically to save power. So when then the drive is spinning at 5400 RPM the heads are also capable of reading and writing data. But the motor is 7200 RPM and is capable of running at a lower speed too.

Luca

[andyb]

That sounds excelent, now all we need is a test to find out how much of a hammering the drive needs to get before it spins the drive at a speed faster than 5400 rpm.

After that we should be able to identify whether the drive actually opperates whilst it is "dynamically" adjusting its speed, or whether the drive spins up to 6000 rpm then reads/writes, spins up to 6500 rpm then reads/writes and so on.


Andy

[Nick Geraedts]

Actually... that's not entirely true. The Green Power drives don't dynamically adjust thier speeds, since the spinup/slowdown would actually increase power consumption, like the power spike you get when a drive first spins up.

The manufacturer is careful in not directly citing spindle speed, instead nominally positioning the Caviar GP as a "7200 RPM-class" drive. Under its "IntelliPower" moniker, WD claims a "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance." Some folks have misinterpreted some admittedly vague specs on WD's website. Under "Rotational Speed," the manufacturer cites "IntelliPower (5400 to 7200 RPM)." This does not mean the drive dynamically changes its spindle speed during operation... indeed, such a feature would entail considerable mechanical engineering and would in many ways defeat the point -- rapidly accelerating and decelerating the spindle's speed would increase rather than decrease net power draw. Rather, the IntelliPower term indicates that the GP family as a whole does not have a set spindle speed (nor a set buffer size, for that matter). Different capacity points may feature differing spin speeds and buffer sizes. For those that must know, WD admits "sub-6000 RPM operation" for the 1-TB Caviar GP (more on this on the following page).

Source - StorageReview.com

Regardless, the GP drives give 7200RPM-like performance for a significant decrease in power requirements.

[Luminair]

It is pretty bad when their own employees are confused. That company needs to get a clue.

[quest_for_silence]

like the power spike you get when a drive first spins up.

Well, such a spike occurs when a drive first spins up from 0 rpm, not from 5400rpm: I guess it would do some difference.

Moreover, as far as I know, WD currently haven't stated anything yet about how often and how fast GP's motor should accelerate or decelerate: so I mean that what SR says is what they think about the principle, not how WD have actually implemented it.

Luca

[gb115b]

i cannot notice any difference in noise while it is running that might indicate any speeding up or slowing down

that's not to say it isn't happening...

[andyb]

Well it seems that we have come beyond full circle.

A drive that dynamically adjusts its speed form 5400-7200-rpm, evidence from SR that suggests otherwise, suspicion that WD are lying and SR are correct, a WD e-mail stating that it does change speed, suspicion that WD are lying........

Nick, are SPCR going to be given one of these drives to test.?


Andy

[bkh]

I went to the WD web site to see if they have a clear answer to the question of spin speed.

From the Greenpower page, it states that for any particular size of WD GP drive, the spindle speed is fixed, not dynamically changing. It also states that, depending on which drive in the family, the speed ranges from 5400 to 7200:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/greenpower.asp

Here's the relevant quotation from that page:
IntelliPowerâ„¢ - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each GreenPower drive model, WD uses a different and invariable RPM. Throughout the product line, RPM ranges between 5400 and 7200.

On this spec document the average access time is given as 5.6 ms, which is 1/2 the rotational latency of a drive spinning at 5400rpm (rounded from 5.56):
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-701229.pdf

Suggestive; almost definitive. I'm concluding that this drive always spins at 5400 but the WDC marketing department was afraid to admit it. So instead we get the feeling that they are lying to us, and we aren't sure that we trust the company at all.

[Nick Geraedts]

Reading data from a drive that's dynamically changing speeds is very very difficult. The problem lies in the fact that you need to know the exact rotational position of the disk, down to microdegrees. It'd be a computational nightmare correlating disk position, velocity, and acceleration to find out what part of the disk the read heads are actually sitting over at any given time.

I don't think WD ever meant to lie to us, but there has been a lot of confusion about what these drives actually do. When I first read about them, I also thought that the drives would adjust their speed on the fly. Regardless of the miscommunication, WD has produced a fairly unique drive in terms of approach to the market. I, for one, would highly consider buying a few of these drives for my file server when the need to expand arises. They're quiet, draw little power at idle, and perform well enough for most everyday applications.

I'm not sure if we're going to be getting any of these in soon, but I'll bug Mike to see if we can. I'd be really interested in getting to play with one.

[andyb]

So instead we get the feeling that they are lying to us, and we aren't sure that we trust the company at all.

I didnt to start with, I was looking for evidence to prove they they are a bunch of lying arseholes.... but they have come to their own defence, ironically proving that they are lying arseholes.

My job is done

Thanks for the help "bkh", well done, you have done us all a good service, now all we need to do is to persuade everyone to stop buying their drives, but they are quiet.... well, they lie, their diagnostics never fail their drives.... they claim technology that does not exist etc etc......

Who can we trust, anyone exept WD and Fujitsu.


Andy

[bkh]

>now all we need to do is to persuade everyone to stop buying their drives

That is not my conclusion. I think that we want the facts so that we can evaluate the tradeoffs among performance, power, heat, noise,....
Accurate specs help, as do high-quality performance tests and reviews such as found at storagereview.com.

The conclusion I draw is to choose the Hitachi if performance matters most, and choose the WD if green and quiet matter more. Both are reasonable choices at present.

[djkest]

Well, perhaps they operate at 5400 rpm to save power and to be quieter, BUT they don't want people to know that because everyone is thinking that 7200 rpm is the only way to go for high performance. One of my friends is an engineer at LSI logic, and he knows quite a few things about hard drives. One thing he mentioned is that even though the rotational speed of a drive may not change, a 7200 rpm drive of today is much faster than a 7200 rpm drive from 5 years ago. It's all about data density. If you pack more bits into the same space, you read data faster than you did before.

So perhaps in the intrest of power and noise, they are running at 5400 RPM, but have increased density, delivering the performance of their previous 7200 RPM drives. Deceptive to be sure, but I'm not about to give up on them because of some confused statements.

I'm a big WD fan, I've owned many, none have failed, good performance. My new WD 250GB sata 3.0gb/s hard drive is very, very quiet.
( Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM)

[tima]

I went to the WD web site to see if they have a clear answer to the question of spin speed.

From the Greenpower page, it states that for any particular size of WD GP drive, the spindle speed is fixed, not dynamically changing. It also states that, depending on which drive in the family, the speed ranges from 5400 to 7200:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/greenpower.asp

Here's the relevant quotation from that page:
IntelliPowerâ„¢ - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each GreenPower drive model, WD uses a different and invariable RPM. Throughout the product line, RPM ranges between 5400 and 7200.

On this spec document the average access time is given as 5.6 ms, which is 1/2 the rotational latency of a drive spinning at 5400rpm (rounded from 5.56):
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-701229.pdf

Suggestive; almost definitive. I'm concluding that this drive always spins at 5400 but the WDC marketing department was afraid to admit it. So instead we get the feeling that they are lying to us, and we aren't sure that we trust the company at all.

To confuse things further, my WD10EACS came in a retail box that is clearly labeled "7200 RPM SATA hard drive". The only external indication the box contains a GP drive is a small green sticker affixed to the lower right front that identifies it as such. (The RPM is not on this sticker, but "16 MB cache" is.) I'm happy with the drive and wouldn't care if it turned out to spin at 5400 RPM, but if this is really the case, it would be a pretty bad blunder on WD's part to ship a 5400 RPM drive in a box that describes it as 7200 RPM.

[Luminair]

So instead we get the feeling that they are lying to us, and we aren't sure that we trust the company at all.

I didnt to start with, I was looking for evidence to prove they they are a bunch of lying arseholes.... but they have come to their own defence, ironically proving that they are lying arseholes.

My job is done

Thanks for the help "bkh", well done, you have done us all a good service, now all we need to do is to persuade everyone to stop buying their drives, but they are quiet.... well, they lie, their diagnostics never fail their drives.... they claim technology that does not exist etc etc......

Who can we trust, anyone exept WD and Fujitsu.


Andy

You are totally off base. For weeks the WD online documentation has explained how GreenPower drives worked. We've known conclusively since the StorageReview review came out that the drives are 5400rpm. While the WD documentation is a little confusing, that just means WD isn't the best at writing documentation, and that YOU are confused. It does not mean that the company lies. It certainly doesn't affect the quality of their products.

[Vicotnik]

Typing 7200RPM on a 5400RPM HDD is "bad documentation"?

[andyb]

You are totally off base. For weeks the WD online documentation has explained how GreenPower drives worked. We've known conclusively since the StorageReview review came out that the drives are 5400rpm. While the WD documentation is a little confusing, that just means WD isn't the best at writing documentation, and that YOU are confused. It does not mean that the company lies. It certainly doesn't affect the quality of their products.

Their "accurate" information might have been on their website for weeks, but I didnt find it, I didnt need to, all of the people selling it ARE selling it as a 7200rpm drive.

The fact that the drives performance isnt far off of the fastest 7200rpm drives is not the point, I will explain the point once more.

They are lying.

Lets have a look at a couple of eTailers shall we, and see if they say 5400 rpm with most of the performance of a 7200rpm drive.

http://www.dabs.com/productlist.aspx?&N ... PageMode=1
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productli ... &subid=940

Nope.

NewEgg (where I dont shop because they are 3,000 miles away) actually use WD's "official lie" 5400rpm - 7200rpm

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory ... ard-Drives

Is my point clear - YES, is my point valid - YES.

I wouldnt buy a car that said 3-litre petrol performance only to discover AFTER I bought it that its actually a 2-litre engine that has the same top end performance as another 3-litre car but doesnt accelerate as fast, WTF would you do, just say "oh well", they decieved me, but I will keep it anyway, no way, you would be pissed off because you havent got what you bought.

I will again point out that I have nothing against this 5400rpm drive that performs more like a 7200rpm drive, just in the same way that no one had anything against Seagate's 5400.3 2.5" drives that performed almost as well as 7200rpm 2.5" drives. The difference being that Seagate didnt feel it neccessary to lie to their customers.

It's WD's marketing department that are at fault, not its engineers, and I can only expect that this bites WD in the arse as loads of people return their drives because its description doesnt match the product. In the UK we have laws that forbid this, and the end user has the right to return the product because it is mis-described, and the end-user can also claim back delivery costs from the eTailer, who will in turn have to claim it back from WD, or they might just put the price up.

The onus is on WD though, if eTailers such as OCUK started advertising WD's drive as 5400 rpm so people didnt return it then WD could sue them for mis-information, at which point WD would loose in the UK courts.


Andy

[elec999]

To get this straight, the Western Digital 1TB hard drive spins at 5400rpm but performs almost like a 7200rpm.
Thanks

[Nick Geraedts]

They are lying.

Lets have a look at a couple of eTailers shall we, and see if they say 5400 rpm with most of the performance of a 7200rpm drive.

http://www.dabs.com/productlist.aspx?&N ... PageMode=1
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productli ... &subid=940

Nope.

NewEgg (where I dont shop because they are 3,000 miles away) actually use WD's "official lie" 5400rpm - 7200rpm

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory ... ard-Drives

Is my point clear - YES, is my point valid - YES.

Actually... you stated the problem yourself - the retailers are advertising the drive as a 7200RPM drive. If WD tells the retailer that the drive spins somewhere between 5400 and 7200RPM, what number do you think will generate the most sales? WD doesn't tell the retailers how to sell their drives - they just provide the hardware. Nowhere in any online document from WD do they guarantee that the drive spins at 7200RPM. To use your car example, if the second-hand dealership tells you that the car you're going to buy has a 3L engine, but the manufacturer claims it to be 2L, who's at fault?

You're upset because they didn't tell you that the 1TB WD GP drive spins at 6234RPM (or whatever the number is), but rather told you the range of speeds that the family of drives spins at. There's a subtle difference between not telling the whole truth and telling a lie.

Edit - on that note - has anyone found a conclusive piece of evidence that says the drives do indeed spin at 5400RPM? The access time from an above post doesn't prove anything, since they'll give the worst possible score to cover their tracks. If you get a drive with better than 5.6ms access time, are you really going to do anything about it? That way, for any drive in the family (even the one that might actually be spinning at 5400RPM) gives the worst-case performance of a 5.6ms access time. If you get a drive with a 4ms access time, you'll walk away happy, and never say a thing.

[andyb]

To use your car example, if the second-hand dealership tells you that the car you're going to buy has a 3L engine, but the manufacturer claims it to be 2L, who's at fault?

You always blame the first point of contact, the person who sold you the product, but most eTailers screw things up from time to time, and they will do their upmost to sell their goods, they sell things on their headline specs.

Another example

This would be as ridiculous as a car manufacturer saying:

"Ford Whizzbang 6-seat car 0-60 mph in 6 seconds"

Your going to think f*cking great, I can take the kids on holiday camping and show off to the girls behind my wifes back.

You buy it and then find out that it takes 20 seconds to get to 60mph, you then read all of their literature before you discover that its the 2-seater Whizzbang that goes that fast, you can show off - but your kids wont fit in.

You didnt buy a whole family of Whizzbangs you bought the "6-seater that says 0-60 mph in 6 seconds".

Most end users dont read all of the information, some dont read any at all. What people will read is the small amount of sales literature in front of them, and you are quite right the average person will always believe what they want to believe, and thats going to be whatever is in their best interests.

And again I will quote, this time from NewEgg:

"Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
New green power drive, low power"

They see this 1TB drive described as 5400 to 7200 RPM. This doesnt state that the reference to the speed covers the entire family of drives. They only see 1TB, 5400 to 7200 rpm 16MB Cache.

Their advertising is misleading, it doesnt matter how much info they put out if their headline specs are wrong, its headline specs people buy on.

6 seats 0-60 in 6 seconds
1GB 5400 to 7200 rpm


Andy

[djkest]

Well, lets play devil's advocate here.

Western Digital engineers come up with an idea.

Engineers:"Hey boss, we have a great new technology. We can increase the data density and spin the drive slower. It will give us 7200 rpm performance but the power consumption and noise of a 5400 rpm drive."

Boss:"No way. No one makes a 5400 rpm drive. If we make one, we will be the laughingstock of the storage device market. People associate 7200 rpm with performance. If anything, we should make it have a higher rotational speed! No one would buy this, no one even makes a 5400 rpm drive anymore"

Marketing: "You guys are both right. Here's what we do. We state it is a variable speed between 5400 and 7200. Then we make one model that increases speed a little in the same line. Then we can make claim X without really meaning it, allowing us to use this great technology without ruining our reputation"

Engineer: "We can't lie about..."

Boss: "Brilliant! Let's do that people!"


The analogy of the car does not apply here. Not in either case. At best, the only deception here is that they aren't very clear on what speeds it spins at, but it does maintain the performance of 7200 rpm. It would be like a 4 cyl instead of a V-6, but it has a turbo on it. But do we have hard evidence that it is locked at 5400 and nothing else? Also, these drives do not claim to be fast. They claim to be green. And the environmental movement is all about misrepresenting data anyway.

Currently many people use laptop drives and other ways to slow things down, and it isn't supposed to make much difference in overall performance. So why when WD actually makes a quiet efficient drive do people so desperately need the full 7200 rpm spindle speed?

Btw, did I mention I want one of these? I checked a couple days ago and I couldn't find a single 5400 rpm drive for sale.

[andyb]

Your Devils Advocate conversation is probably spot on.

And yes this drive is promoted as being, cool, quiet and "Green", and I dont disagree with that, but Toyota doesnt market their "Green" Prius as a Sports Car.

Going back to car analogy's, mine is better than yours Seriously it is.... I chose "seats" to represent storage, and acceleration with a reference to WD's claim of 5400-7200 rpm across a whole range of models within the same family.

WD should have aimed their drive directly and ONLY at its true target audience, the people who dont care about top notch performance, the people who do care about Cool, Quiet, Power and Capacity. They blew it by making a claim that would not stand up in court by aming at the performance market as well by using that figure 7200rpm.

They have taken a step too far. They could have got away with claiming 5400rpm that performs like a 7200 rpm drive, because that would be mostly true.

Lets face it, when the Samsung F1 does eventually come out, it will probably be the fastest 7200 rpm drive out there for sequential transfer rates, WD would cry fould play if Samsung claimed it was a 10,000 rpm drive, because that competes with their Raptor, at a similar cost and 7 times the capacity.

Look at how many people around here go nuts when they hear SilenX's latest claim of 80cfm AND 15Db, its a lie to sell to the unknowing, WD is doing the same thing.

I cant believe anyone can actually defend WD's marketing and still think of themselves as a fair and honest human being.


Andy

[toNka]

Well, here's some scans of my retail package:

Front:


Right Side (16MB Cache):


Left Side (7200rpm):


If those specs are incorrect, that's false advertising!

[mcv]

I get the impression it's now pretty well established that it is indeed 5400 rpm, and if the package says 7200 rpm, I expect this drive to be illegal in quite a lot of countries.

Which is a shame, because it sounds like a really nice drive.

[merlin]

I'm surprised Western Digital wasn't smarter in just excluding rpm from the device specs in the first place. Now they've opened a can of worms that looks like an easy class action lawsuit target. It would have been smartest to just say it's 5400rpm and promote the low heat, low wattage, low noise, and almost comparable performance as an advantage over 7200rpm drives.

[charonme]

I reported one wholesaler in my country because they claimed 7200rpm for the GP disks and were not willing to correct that info. The trade inspection organization inspected the wholesaler and reported that they only used specification papers supplied by the manufacturer so there's nothing they can do! In effect they are free to falsely advertise as long as the (false) information comes from the manufacturer
At least they wrote to me that if I suspect the disk not to be 7200rpm, I can RMA it

[Luminair]

I had no idea the retail box said 7200rpm. That is totally wrong. The artists working for marketing probably just made a mistake, but still, totally wrong.

[Cryoburner]

I reported one wholesaler in my country because they claimed 7200rpm for the GP disks and were not willing to correct that info.

Well, if they're quoting the specs listed on the packaging, they aren't really doing anything wrong on their end. The blame would be entirely on Western Digital, for advertising those incorrect specs to begin with.

[bkh]

> the wholesaler ... only used specification papers supplied by the manufacturer so there's nothing they can do! In effect they are free to falsely advertise as long as the (false) information comes from the manufacturer.

I had a similar experience with a vendor in the USA. They asked WD a second time to be sure, and were told it is 7200, so that is how they describe the 1GB WD GP on their web site. I think it is a shame that WD can give such incorrect information repeatedly, with no consequence.

[Vicotnik]

And it's totally unnecessary. The major reason why the WD GP is such a nice HDD for storage is the fact that it's a 5400RPM drive. They should market it as such instead of lying.