1
I recently purchased a pair of 1TB Western Digital WD1002FBYS RE3 drives for use in an external RAID enclosure. I have found that they tend to drop out of the array after a while. Thinking it was the enclosure I tried them on another one but found the same issue.
So a bit of googling and I found this thread which suggests that:
WD's "RE" (RAID Edition) HDDs support Time-Limited Error Recovery ("TLER"): As a non-TLER HDD fills up with data, the error detection firmware might take too long, and the RAID controller may drop that HDD from a RAID array.
So now I wonder what SATA drives have firmware which is compatible with RAID arrays (esp. RAID 1, 5, but not 0)? I have not been able to come up with the magic set of keywords to ellicit the answer from Google. However, various sites suggest that Seagate & Hitachi are in general OK.
Does anyone have any generic (or even specific) guidance on how to work out if a drive's firmware may harbour code that is potentially an issue in a RAID>0 setting other than stating that it must be 'enterprise' ready?
What enclosures are you using? – ErnieTheGeek – 2011-06-20T16:29:17.760
1I think you misunderstood your links. The TLER problem you mention is only any issue for drives that are not RE drives. The drives you purchased are RE drives, and so shouldn't have that problem. – Joel Coehoorn – 2011-06-20T16:39:51.787
Yes, indeed - does look I misunderstood. Thanks to all for clearing this up. – nroam – 2011-06-20T17:16:10.603