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Comment by Sholmesy | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is a horrendously bad response, no apology, no admission of guilt, probably written by the legal team.

I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please correct me if I'm wrong):

- They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make higher capacity drives for cheaper.

- The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application context (citation needed/general consensus?)

- They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application contexts, when they aren't.

- They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive drives instead?

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So it seems like ultimately, what they've done is to move what used to be "Red" into "Red Pro" and make "Red" a more budget oriented line (without clearly communicating this in advance).

The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.

I would agree. The old reds were far more along the lines of what Red Pro is now in terms of reliability.

For anyone who's wondering, a bit of homework with the major parts suppliers here in the UK suggests a 50-60% price increase is typical moving from (new) Red to the Red Pro of the same size.

The Red Pros are 7200 RPM vs 5400 for the non-Pro Reds. That will affect heat output and noise.

Higher RPM drives also generally have a slightly lower linear density (the TPI should generally remain the same), meaning for the same capacity they require more platters. Frequently with little in the way of throughput increases (due to said lower density).

The one thing faster spinning drives do buy, is lower seek time because rotational latency tends to be the largest contributor to average seek.

That is part of the reason you don't see a lot of drives spinning faster than 7200RPM these days. SSD's ate the market which wanted speed over capacity,

I've been patiently waiting for 3600/4200 RPM 5.25" drives to make a comeback.. <chuckle>

It's brand exploitation. They build a good brand, than sacrifice it for short term gain to rip off customers, while building a new brand to replace it. It's very common in the fashion industry (Gucci, etc)

Sort of like how Pyrex used to mean borosilicate glass, which has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, and is thus oven-safe.

This was the case for sixtysome years.

Then some douchebag decided that Pyrex wasn't a material, it was a "brand", and started slapping the name on kitchenware made of soda-lime glass, which will straight-up explode if you treat it like borosilicate.

Given the enthusiasm for class action lawsuits in the US I am amazed this passed muster with management and the legal department.

war on drugs was their reasoning; not sure if it's true or acceptable and yeah I'm pretty amazed it flew in the US.

But then another brand by Corning is the same, they had a range of unbreakable product called Corelle, the new stuff since it got sold off just isn't the same.

Old school Corelle is the best ceramics you could get. I have 40+ year old Corelle plates and bowls in the cabinets right now. Used daily and dropped hundreds of times over the years.

> war on drugs was their reasoning

Uh what ? What do you mean, I don’t see any relationship between Pyrex and the war on drugs at all and I’m really curious !

I'm not sure how their PR dept spun it but borosilicate glass is incredibly resistant to sudden changes in temperature as well as having better chemical and acid resistance making it ideal for chemistry lab work, presumably some news stories broke about 'amateur chemists' using Pyrex cookware for a different type of cooking. It's not like borosilicate is a controlled material though, the reason for the switch is likely that soda lime glass is significantly cheaper to produce, they did suggest that their soda lime glass was more mechanically durable but then again borosilicate glass is also known for being mechanically durable.

In the UK and probably the rest of Europe you can still buy borosilicate Pyrex made in France, but this single decision destroyed any trust I had in the brand. It's not even a new decision[0] and I am mostly unaffected by it but any discussion about Pyrex in person will invariably lead to me butting in with an emphasis on borosilicate making the glass temperature resistant and not the brand, it shouldn't even be necessary but occasionally import Pyrex makes its way onto places like Amazon.

[0] http://themainframe.ca/content/images/2015/09/Pyrex-infograp...

This is exactly what Intel did to the Pentium line. Remember when that brand was synonymous with high-performance consumer CPUs?

To be fair they weren't using Pentium for high performance processors for a while. It's not like they put out 2c/4t parts and called them i9.

Which is what they have been doing the i7/i9 line. Suddenly you can buy a i7/i9 laptop, despite it not having anywhere near the performance of the desktop class processors except maybe for a few seconds of burst activity.

A few years ago i7 also meant basically the high end desktop market (socket 2011) which meant more ram and IO. But then they slapped it on the dual channel desktop socket market.

So, yah the brand becomes meaningless when its just marketing for "this one will cost you more".

They burned the brand name through incompetence, not malice.

Shrinkflation for tech, I guess.

> They used a technology that impacts performance

I feel like this is an understatement. In certain scenarios for which they were designed, because of this performance issue, they fail to work at all. Maybe that is covered by the following points but I feel like "stops responding" and "impacts performance" are very different things.

The worse performance is major part, but what makes it worse is that these drives regularly fail on RAID rebuilds when a lot of writing happens, which is a time when your data is most vulnerable and increasing risk of losing data.

> no omission of guilt

Freudian slip?

Ha, fixed. Thanks

This is pretty much correct, yes.

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