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WD's bogus marketing.

The claim that if you MOVE from a 500g blue to a 1T black you get 44% performance increase. It is not a comparison between the tow, sneaky.
 
VirtualLarry said:
http://promotions.newegg.com/wd/14-4254/index.html?icid=272096

Here, they claim that the WD Black drives offer 44% higher performance than their WD Blue drives.

Only, the comparison is between a 500GB Blue, and a 1TB Black. Of course the higher platter density is going to affect the benchmarks.

Why didn't WD compare 500GB vs 500GB, or 1TB vs 1TB?

What are they trying to hide here?
Click to expand...

The fact that the price delta from a 1tb blue to a 1tb black is going almost exclusively to your extended warranty...
 
I saw the 'dual processor' thingy before, but thought it was bogus. Now WD themselves are saying it too, but what does it mean? Just what does a processor do in a hdd? I mean, isn't most of the stuff taken care of by cpu/chipset and then the hdd just does what it's told to do?
 
In their defense the Blue tops out at 1TB. The Blacks go to 4TB. It wouldn't exactly be a fair comparison to take the top of one line and compare it to the bottom of the other. They probably could have increased the delta if they compared the 1TB Blue to the 4TB Black.
 
coffeejunkee said:
I saw the 'dual processor' thingy before, but thought it was bogus. Now WD themselves are saying it too, but what does it mean? Just what does a processor do in a hdd? I mean, isn't most of the stuff taken care of by cpu/chipset and then the hdd just does what it's told to do?
Click to expand...
Apparently its for task splitting with the drive one chip handles I/O communication and the other handles the spindles, servos and so on.
 
coffeejunkee said:
I saw the 'dual processor' thingy before, but thought it was bogus. Now WD themselves are saying it too, but what does it mean? Just what does a processor do in a hdd? I mean, isn't most of the stuff taken care of by cpu/chipset and then the hdd just does what it's told to do?
Click to expand...

You should read this:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

But tl;dr is, hard drives have controllers, those controllers are CPUs, and they come in multiple-core variants just like the CPUs in your cell phone or higher end Raspberry Pi clones.
 
coffeejunkee said:
Just what does a processor do in a hdd?
Click to expand...
It executes the firmware instructions and physically controls the hardware, among other things.

I mean, isn't most of the stuff taken care of by cpu/chipset and then the hdd just does what it's told to do?
Click to expand...
The CPU chipset/chipset can't physically control the drive, it just sends software instructions. The actual hardware control (e.g. moving the heads the right physical distance and height) is done at the drive's hardware level.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Sadly, we're accustomed to it.

We SHOULD have put our foot down and/or drawn a line when HD manufacturers started using MB instead of MiB. But, well, give an inch...
Click to expand...

I have been installing HDD since mid 80s and never seen MiB, When did they change it?

Now the other change of 1024 to 1000 for commercial use was stupid in my opinion of course, Most mass media public users wouldn't know the difference between bit and byte anyways.
 
Lorne said:
Now the other change of 1024 to 1000
Click to expand...

That is the "Mebi" vs "Mega" thing.

Mebi = 1048576bytes
Mega = 1000000bytes

At least that is what people that are all for the Mebi thing insist.

I personally think it is a result of people not quite grasping that SI is based on decimal so it is unrelated to binary but it breaks their mind so they came up with this system. What most of these guys miss also is the "Bytes" is arbitrary as well. While 8bits / 1byte is common it is was not always true and you can still run in to 7, 15 and 16bit -> byte systems out there. It makes the mega / mebi this fairly pointless since even the base unit is up for debate. The kilobyte = 1024 bytes was also decided back in the 1950s. No idea why they felt they needed to change it 49 years later.
 
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coffeejunkee said:
I saw the 'dual processor' thingy before, but thought it was bogus. Now WD themselves are saying it too, but what does it mean? Just what does a processor do in a hdd? I mean, isn't most of the stuff taken care of by cpu/chipset and then the hdd just does what it's told to do?
Click to expand...
CPUs controlled some of the oldest HDDs, including 10MB models used in the first PCs, and dual CPUs were advertised even for HDDs from the 30GB generation, one model having a Texas Instruments digital signal processor and an AT&T ARM conventional CPU.
 
Anything with a firmware has a processor/CPU. Which works out to be pretty much everything. Disk drives, Ethernet and WiFi cards, audio controllers, webcams, etc.

They are often very simple, though, and are generally called microcontrollers; e.g., something using an 8-bit Intel 8051 ISA with a mere 64KB (bankable) address space.

They're generally not something that people talk about, because they generally just do their job without drama. With SSDs, these controllers got more attention because they are a lot more complicated than the controllers found in hard drives. They gotta keep track of NAND tables, handle garbage collection, wear leveling, etc., and they gotta do it fast. And now suddenly it matters. And some of the marketing from that is spilling over into hard drives where the job of the microcontrollers is still pretty boring and pedestrian (but when has that ever dissuaded the marketing department?).
 
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dave_the_nerd said:
You should read this:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

But tl;dr is, hard drives have controllers, those controllers are CPUs, and they come in multiple-core variants just like the CPUs in your cell phone or higher end Raspberry Pi clones.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that was an interesting read. But I guess what I really wanted to ask is, how much of the speed of an hdd depends on the controller/processor?

I suppose the dual processors on the blacks are actually the main feature responsible for the extra speed over the blues. Which isn't that much when you look at sequential speeds (logical, same plattersize and rpm, at least for the 1TB models) but the blacks do a bit better on random and accesstime.

Still, dual processors in itself doesn't say all that much. Need more info like frequency to be able to really compare.
 
Lorne said:
I have been installing HDD since mid 80s and never seen MiB, When did they change it?

Now the other change of 1024 to 1000 for commercial use was stupid in my opinion of course, Most mass media public users wouldn't know the difference between bit and byte anyways.
Click to expand...
Really MiB is there to make tech people feel special. MB is a much better system for basing measurement on because it's much easier to understand. The other big issue is with Software guys calling MiB MB. That's one of the thing the general populace has issues with, why are two different people saying the same thing and meaning two different things?
 
code65536 said:
🙄 MiB is there for disambiguation. Because accuracy and precision are important sometimes.
Click to expand...

Sorry I see where you miss understand me. I am talking about the use of a binary based measurement system and not people using MiB when MiB is being used. If they absolutely have to use the binary system pointlessly then they really should stop using SI prefixes. I mean from the begining using the binary system for size for no reason was pointless and using SI prefixes just because they wanted to just makes it worse.

I feel for the HDD manufacturers because they used it properly but they are the ones sued for their dependencies and not the software guys.
 
Topweasel said:
Sorry I see where you miss understand me. I am talking about the use of a binary based measurement system and not people using MiB when MiB is being used. If they absolutely have to use the binary system pointlessly then they really should stop using SI prefixes. I mean from the begining using the binary system for size for no reason was pointless and using SI prefixes just because they wanted to just makes it worse.

I feel for the HDD manufacturers because they used it properly but they are the ones sued for their dependencies and not the software guys.
Click to expand...

The HDD manufactures used it because the could show bigger sizes for marketing reasons. The reasons these sizes exist they way they do is because there is advantages to using the binary boundaries because of the way it maps to address lines. It is not convenient to design a 3GB memory chip because later the system has to remap the addressing to handle the next 3GB chip etc.

Heck the SI prefixes weren't even defined as a "[directly as] power of 10" until 1960. They were defined as exponents.

Kilo -> 1000^1 ----> 1024 ^1
Mega -> 1000^2 ----> 1024^2
Giga -> 1000^3 ----> 1024^3

etc. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where the binary naming conventions came from.
 
Topweasel said:
Sorry I see where you miss understand me. I am talking about the use of a binary based measurement system and not people using MiB when MiB is being used. If they absolutely have to use the binary system pointlessly then they really should stop using SI prefixes. I mean from the begining using the binary system for size for no reason was pointless and using SI prefixes just because they wanted to just makes it worse.

I feel for the HDD manufacturers because they used it properly but they are the ones sued for their dependencies and not the software guys.
Click to expand...

Computers are binary devices. Binary is native. Binary prefixing should and needs to be the default. It's the storage manufacturers--HDDs, ODDs, etc.--that are "pointlessly" using a foreign and inappropriate prefixing system because it makes their numbers look better. Now, I do agree that there should be distinct prefixes (the arguments against doing so is generally pretty pathetic, like the prefixes sounding funny--I'm pretty sure people thought "Google" sounded funny back in the 90's), but I strongly disagree with the notion that somehow the hard drive manufacturers got it right.
 
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