[megmond77]

I'm hoping for a review not only of the F1 series (most notably the single platter model since it's power friendly and still reasonably sized), but also the p7k500 from Hitachi which should be out soon. It could be a great competitor for the WD drive.

Off topic: Samsung changed their specs too, for the F1 drives. I'm working up to building a not-so-power-hungry PC soon, and am deciding on which harddisk to use. 2.5" is too small/slow for me, so I'm looking in the 3.5" class. There are a few options now (or will be soon) for such drives:
* WD GP drive
* Samsung F1 320GB (single platter)
* Hitachi p7k500

The last two are not yet available, but have spec sheets. When I checked a while ago, the F1 datasheet was at rev 4.4 and claimed the following numbers (for 320, 500 and 1GB drives respectively):
seek 7.0 / 8.2 / 8.6
idle 5.5 / 7.2 / 7.7

Which for the single platter especially is pretty good compared to 'standard' 3.5" drives. However, checking back recently, the datasheet was upped to rev 4.5.6 and apart from introducing a 640GB model, they also changed power draw specs:
seek 6.7 / 9.2 / 9.7
idle 5.3 / 8.0 / 8.7

Interestingly, the values for the single platter 320GB are slightly lower, but the rest is much higher.

Class action suit? Of course not. Maybe grounds for returning the device because you're not happy with it (if already have one). At least that's the way it works in my country

They probably tuned their measurements or corrected some mistakes. Or maybe they made some changes to the drives for performance or reliability issues causing the higher power specs.

[datestardi]

bensen, on Nov 20 2007, 03:04 PM, said:

3 250gb platters in the 750gb model?

HDTach results for HD753LJ (average read: 75.2 MB/s)... it's only one test, so the results are not confirmed:
[url="http://home.arcor.de/realmadnex/forum/HD753LJ.png"]http://home.arcor.de/realmadnex/forum/ HD753LJ.png[/url]

HDTach results for P7K500 (250 GB platters, average read: 78.9 MB/s):
[url="http://home.arcor.de/data-home/benches/HDP725050GLA360/hdtach.gif"]http://home.arcor.de/ data-home/benches/HDP...A360/hdtach.gif[/url]

Original German Page for images:
http://www.planet3dn...h...2525&page=2

Google Translated Page:
http://translate.goo...t...en&ie=UTF-8

[Sadie]

StoX, on Oct 25 2007, 12:28 PM, said:

Interlink, on Oct 25 2007, 07:42 AM, said:

It is easy to measure the spindle speed of a HDD.
I mounted a headset microphone on top of my WD10EACS's case and evaluated the FFT spectrum with AudioAnalyzer.

The maximum at 90Hz represents the spindle speed (5400rpm).
The second FFT spectrum was recorded on top of a HD501LJ. Max at 120Hz.
90Hz * 60rpm/Hz = 5400rpm
120Hz * 60rpm/Hz = 7200rpm

Conclusion? The 1TB Western Digital is 5400 rpm sometimes? All the time? WD says that the drive changes between 5400 and 7200 rpm depending on the load. That is the essence of GreenPower technology, they say. I am lost. Thanks.

WD claims the drive changes between 5400 and 7200.
Every performance test (including Eugene's latency calculation) says is 5400 rpm
this acoustic test says 5400 rpm
there has never (to my knowledge) been any previous drive product that supported varying rpm.
To me, the engineering challenges to "vary" rpm in a disk drive appear insurmountable, the motors aren't designed that way, the heads/sliders aren't designed that way, and varying platter speed presents challenges to firmware, challenges to servo contol, and challenges to error correction
IMHO ... any claim of varying the rpm is BS, plan and simple.

So, sorry WD ... until you demonstrate this drive can run at both 5400 and 7200 rpm, I will never, ever believe anything WD claims without material proof from some other reputable, trustworthy source.
cheers!

[Sadie]

quote name='bensen' date='Nov 19 2007, 12:48 PM' post='246944']
@stox
i can't understand the problem
if they write 5400-7200 or 5400 to 7200 they don't say that the spindlespeed is variable!
the speed is between 5400 and 7200, but fixed

everything else comes from the fantasies of some people
[/quote]

Hi Bensen,
saying the spin speed is between 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm technically meets the letter of the truth if the drive is 5400+ rpm
all results say 5400 rpm
zero results say 7200 rpm
by implying the drive runs faster than 5400rpm: that's WD being intentionally misleading.

[StoX]

This is simply a lie from WD. Be warned of such a company. And yes, they said that (I saved them for future reference):

On 7th August 2007 their web page stated:
Rotational Speed: IntelliPower (5400 to 7200 RPM)

Since the lie was revealed by Internet, on 28th October 2007 that very same page stated:
Rotational Speed: IntelliPower*
*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, invariable RPM.

LIARS!!! ALL SUCH WD DRIVES ARE 5,400 RPM ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME FOR ALL SUCH DRIVES!!! STOP CHEATING US!!!

[youngmoore]

Will add to this by saying I bought a WD 1TB for one of our data center servers. The drive has got to be one of the worst performers out there.
I can't get it past about 23mb for writes no matter what partition and cluster size I pick. My own My book USB 500giger is faster. We were going to
use the drive in the last of our backup's from our Snap 4500's. However the writes are so slow and end up pushing the disk que to over 260 at times
on long files like 4 gig transfers. The svr is no slouch either. Supermicro 1U with 2 Quad core 5400's and 8 gigs of ram. So now I have a to figure out
what to do. Either upgrade our SCSI array or buy a Deskstar? Either way anyone looking at using on of these in a svr needs to choose something else.
The marketing on the box was what got me to buy it in the first place. Thought to myself "wow GP man that will really save atleast something on our power bill
each month since the drive would only be "in use" for about 2 hours each day. I have been a huge fan of WD, in fact our OS is run off a raptor but this GP thing
just isn't going to cut it.

ym

StoX, on Dec 30 2007, 03:41 PM, said:

This is simply a lie from WD. Be warned of such a company. And yes, they said that (I saved them for future reference):

On 7th August 2007 their web page stated:
Rotational Speed: IntelliPower (5400 to 7200 RPM)

Since the lie was revealed by Internet, on 28th October 2007 that very same page stated:
Rotational Speed: IntelliPower*
*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, invariable RPM.

LIARS!!! ALL SUCH WD DRIVES ARE 5,400 RPM ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME FOR ALL SUCH DRIVES!!! STOP CHEATING US!!!

[ghostadmin]

I don't know if you noticed, but the WD GP has a very limited amount of load/unload cycles (300000) in the datasheet. I think this is due to the Intellipark feature where the heads are parked.

Smart is reporting that there is an huge amount of cycles. I have seen also Smartvalues from other GP drives with an rather big amount comparing to other drives.

Example:
Power On Time: 614hours
Load/Unload cycle count: 5637

Thats 9x per hour, other people saw even higher rates here. To sum this, it would mean that the lifetime is expected around 4 years, which could be a bit more.

Is that really critical? If that doesnt matter, why WD is specifying max load/unload cycles in the datasheet?

Also there is no way to adjust it, there are no tools available, even hdparm doesnt work.

I think its similar on laptop drives, what lifetime you can expect here running 24h ?

The reason i am asking because the GP whould be nice for 24h, but due to that "issue" i am not sure about it.

This post has been edited by ghostadmin: 31 March 2008 - 06:27 AM

[ghostadmin]

see also:
http://www.synology....6af00070083f35d

This post has been edited by ghostadmin: 31 March 2008 - 06:38 AM

[Enlightenment]

You want the spindle speed to be lower, for a harddrive that is aimed at mass storage, not really as a system disk.

For storing data like MP3's, Video's, etc. Performance is not really important; since the disk is many times faster and you only need x KB/s to listen to music or video; more will not help. What does help is a quiet, cool, energy efficient and stable drive, as in vibrations. So for storage, i prefer 5400rpm to 7200rpm.

Especially the new WD Green 10EADS 1TB drive is very nice with 334GB per platter and even lower power consumption (2,9W idle) with a modest price tag. They may also be more reliable than their 7200rpm counterparts because of less friction and less heat generation. And you don't need cooling for them, and they can never overheat themselves in a normal environment. That's a good thing.

[Telstar The Sorcerer]

Enlightenment, on Dec 10 2008, 04:57 AM, said:

You want the spindle speed to be lower, for a harddrive that is aimed at mass storage, not really as a system disk.

For storing data like MP3's, Video's, etc. Performance is not really important; since the disk is many times faster and you only need x KB/s to listen to music or video; more will not help. What does help is a quiet, cool, energy efficient and stable drive, as in vibrations. So for storage, i prefer 5400rpm to 7200rpm.

Especially the new WD Green 10EADS 1TB drive is very nice with 334GB per platter and even lower power consumption (2,9W idle) with a modest price tag. They may also be more reliable than their 7200rpm counterparts because of less friction and less heat generation. And you don't need cooling for them, and they can never overheat themselves in a normal environment. That's a good thing.

FYI my second GP died a week ago and it's going to rma.
i'd like to try the newer model, it is really stellar.