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Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

arstechnica.com

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Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#131

Post by wtallis »

pseudalopex wrote: post #130
wtallis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kB, MB, GB, etc. were genuinely ill-defined when the drive manufacturers started using them to their advantage. Those units were not standardized by SI or ISO, there was precedent for both the binary and decimal interpretations, the unambiguously binary KiB, MiB, etc. had not yet been introduced, and industry standards organizations like JEDEC and IEC were not particularly helpful in resolving the situation. None of…

Different 500 GB models have different capacities. They're just guaranteed to hold at least 500,000,000,000 bytes.

I haven't actually been able to verify with multiple 500GB hard drives, but the exact byte count I quoted does seem to be universally standard for 500GB SSDs.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#132

Post by throw0101a »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #126
throw0101a wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just randomly so happened that drive manufacturers used the meaning of what the SI folks said the meaning actually was.

While I'll admit they do have a slightly better case here, basically every OS's definition is more important than the SI. They clearly did it to make their drives look bigger. As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones?

> As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones?

Because hard drives, going back to the original (the IBM 350), have used decimal prefixes.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#133

Post by boomboomsubban »

throw0101a wrote: post #132
boomboomsubban wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'll admit they do have a slightly better case here, basically every OS's definition is more important than the SI. They clearly did it to make their drives look bigger. As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones?

> As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones? Because hard drives, going back to the original (the IBM 350), have used decimal prefixes.

At best, that means they should have switched when SSD's happened.

Given what this article is about, I don't know why you're giving HD manufacturers the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#134

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

bleepblorp wrote: post #83
bfuclusion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD volumetric capacity already exceeds spinning disk, and we're just waiting for the price to come down. The horse's dealer's competition wasn't more stables, it was the car.

SSD prices have remained stubbornly high for some strange reason or other. Indeed, they've gone up since the pandemic started. The small number of suppliers for flash memory might have something to do with this.

They are dropping by ~20-30% YoY

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#135

Post by acqq »

floatingatoll wrote: post #99
acqq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#136

Post by ric2b »

swiley wrote: post #121
ric2b wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a lot of competition on GPU's, which happen to be one of the most expensive components. That market is basically just Nvidia (80%+ market share and still dominating in performance/features).

> That market is basically just Nvidia I'm typing this on a machine with a fairly powerfull AMD GPU. The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia, everyone keeps using their special APIs. Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive crap.

> The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia

It's over 80% of GPU the market.

> Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers

AMD can't compete with Nvidia's high end. Especially with the new 30XX series, which crush the performance of Nvidia's 20XX series.

> and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive crap.

Their drivers have a lot of features that AMD doesn't, like G-Sync, DLSS, RTX and others.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#137

Post by 393339 »

dorkwood wrote: post #48

"By doing so, we are able to leverage our economies of scale and pass along those savings to our customers." So it sounds like the reason behind it is that they can save money by eliminating the 5400rpm production line.

Exactly, but then they rightly realized they would also lose all those customers looking for 5400rpm disks. And, no no no, they didn't want THAT.

Easy fix though, smack a new 5400rpm label on those disks and fix the firmware to report 5400rpm, now they could get rid of the production line and retain the customers that weren't looking for 7200rpm disks.

Absolute garbage.

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#138

Post by gorgoiler »

dirkt wrote: post #93
gorgoiler wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#139

Post by aidenn0 »

acqq wrote: post #135
floatingatoll wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Western Digital is trying to redefine the word “RPM”

#140

Post by acqq »

aidenn0 wrote: post #139
acqq wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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