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Differences between desktop and enterprise drives


vca

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While looking for reports of problems about the 2TB Western Digital drives (while thinking about buying one, now prices are getting reasonable) I came across some notes about these drives "dropping out" of RAID arrays and causing problems.  This note from WD support explains that their desktop drives may spend up to 2 minutes trying to read a sector that has problems before giving up and this long delay may cause the RAID controller to drop the drive from the array. They suggest that using the enterprise version of the drive should avoid this issue because the enterprise drive will only retry for about 7 seconds before returning a read error.

 

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1397&p_created=1131638613&p_sid=VjgPHrDj&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTAsMTAmcF9wcm9kcz0yMjcmcF9jYXRzPTE4NiZwX3B2PTEuMjI3JnBfY3Y9MS4xODYmcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PURlc2t0b3AgZWRpdGlvbg!!&p_li=&p_topview=1

 

WD has a name for this "feature": TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery).

 

Now the question is: would a long (i.e. 2 minute) block read cause unRAID to panic and drop a drive?

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

 

 

 

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