Quote:Last time, the issue was Western Digital’s decision to use Shingled Magnetic Recording in its Red NAS drives to squeeze more data onto the drive (negatively impacting some read/write/access speeds). The DataHoarder subreddit has been poking at Red drives again, bringing together an extensive consumer investigation. Western Digital has apparently taken to calling its drives “5400 RPM Class” despite rotating at 7200 RPM. The issue affects a variety of drives according to the Reddit post, including the WD80EMAZ, WD80EZAZ, and apparently others. Some of these are “shucked” drives–pulled from external enclosures–but others appear to be bare drives.

Redditor /u/Amaroko ran an experiment that seems to lay the through out conclusively. They placed a variety of different drives, one at a time, on top of an empty cardboard box with a Blue Yeti mic held above it, then recorded the sounds the drive makes during activity (Gallery). Then they ran the info through spectral analysis. The analysis showed the drive running at 120 cycles per second, which works out to 7,200 cycles per minute.
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Western Digital has since responded to requests for comment on this. Here’s the response they sent to Blocks and Files:
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It seems like Western Digital is saying is that it classifies its drives not on the drive’s actual states, but on the rough performance of the drive in comparison with industry standards. This is a 7200 RPM drive that performs like a 5400 drive as long as you’re not worried about noise or power consumption.

For most users, this kind of thing is going to be relatively inconsequential and go unnoticed. The fact that Western Digital is not just advertising the drive as one speed, but showing it in SMART data, though, is concerning. This is the second time this year the drive maker has been caught telling half-truths about its WD Red NAS drives; that’s only going to put their products under more scrutiny as educated consumers start to lose trust in the brand.