Largest 5400rpm storage?

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samuelmorris
Posts: 168
Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:00 pm
Location: York, UK

Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by samuelmorris » Thu Oct 13, 2016 5:04 am

I've been using some WD80EFZX disks for a while now. They're definitely a lot noisier than the smaller WD Red/Green disks, which I assumed was simply due to the high platter count or possibly a quirk of the Helium design. The 6TB disks are pretty loud during seek but quiet during idle. The 8TB disks are just noisy in general. It took me a little while to notice, but the only explanation is that they're actually 7200rpm disks, despite the fact that all the marketing material says 5400rpm. I don't really understand why WD would need to lie about that.

Looking up this phenomenon online, I quickly happened across this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLurlh_DrWU
Clearly from the 120Hz vibration, that's a 7200rpm disk, so I wrote it off initially as someone having erroneously recorded a WD Red Pro. But they haven't - I now have one in an external caddy, listened closely to it and it sounds identical to this video. Without question it's a WD80EFZX on the label, not a WD8001FFWX, so my conclusion - even the standard WD Red disks are 7200rpm for 8TB. It certainly explains why they're inexplicably fast.

Thing is, by the time I'm populating my server with large numbers of 8TB disks, I don't want them to all be 7200rpm, it's too much heat and noise and I don't need that level of performance. Looking at other manufacturer's product ranges, the current generation all seem to be 7200rpm at higher capacities. The only large capacity option I've seen lower is the ST8000AS0002 - can anyone confirm if they are any good, and indeed 5900rpm as per the label?

Thanks

Sam

Luke M
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Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by Luke M » Sat Oct 22, 2016 7:34 am

Maybe they had an excess inventory of 7200rpm drives so they sneakily relabeled them. Or perhaps there never was a 5400rpm version of the 8TB drive, and it's just a fiction created by WD's marketing department so they can sell the same drive at two prices.

samuelmorris
Posts: 168
Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:00 pm
Location: York, UK

Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by samuelmorris » Sat Oct 22, 2016 7:54 am

It's bizarre, as 5400rpm even shows in the drive stats. The fact that the competing Seagate disks are also 7200rpm once you reach 8TB tells me that for whatever reason, 5400rpm presumably doesn't work too well for the largest capacity disks. It's a nuisance as I was hoping to shrink my drive count by use of the new 8 and 10TB disks, but given that by doing so I'll end up with a bigger heat & noise problem than I started with using 20 5400rpm disks, it doesn't seem worth the cost. I'll stick to 8TB disks in my remote machine for now where power use & cooling are less an issue (was looking at 10TB Ironwolf disks but missed the boat on a lower price, they've gone up a lot), but I'll have to have a long think about what I want to replace my aging 2TB disks with in the local server, not sure I want to go any higher than 6TB at this point...

flyingsherpa
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Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by flyingsherpa » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:51 am

I think Seagate just announced some new, high-capacity 2.5" drives. Not sure if they are available yet, though.

Edit: found the link I read about it.

quest_for_silence
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Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by quest_for_silence » Mon Oct 24, 2016 1:03 pm

flyingsherpa wrote:I think Seagate just announced some new, high-capacity 2.5" drives. Not sure if they are available yet, though.

Edit: found the link I read about it.

Thanks for the heads up: what a shame, it's a SMR drive (probably it has to be), the S stands for shit.

Abula
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Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by Abula » Mon Oct 24, 2016 2:18 pm

quest_for_silence wrote:
flyingsherpa wrote:I think Seagate just announced some new, high-capacity 2.5" drives. Not sure if they are available yet, though.

Edit: found the link I read about it.

Thanks for the heads up: what a shame, it's a SMR drive (probably it has to be), the S stands for shit.
Lol, i though was for silent... jajajaja.

I want to see how the new sager/msi laptops are, most have a big space for the hdds, maybe can fit this big 2.5

samuelmorris
Posts: 168
Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:00 pm
Location: York, UK

Re: Largest 5400rpm storage?

Post by samuelmorris » Mon Oct 24, 2016 2:19 pm

I can't say I'm all that keen on SMR really, having read about it. I'm not likely to suffer too much with the write performance itself, but the actual concept of it unnerves me...

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