Western Digital Red 4TB HDD

player-x said:
Actually you can change the time out to the standard 30sec, with the WD HDD/firmware editor/tool, still i would not recommend these drive for general usage, as most people will not even know how to use the tool!
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Is that DFL-WD or something else?

Is 30 seconds WD's standard? I've read comments about minutes or even hours, but I don't know to which manufacturer that was referring.
 
WD marketing is very powerful. I'd never heard of these Red drives a year ago but all of a sudden I'm convinced they are a must have for my new NAS build. Not sure why...I guess all the marketing jargon from WD has suckered me in.
 
^^ :D

player-x said:
These RED's (and the RE's) are mend for dedicated NAS systems or professional raid controllers, using them on a desktop increases the likelihood of HDD errors, as they depend on the controller as part of there error correction.
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I frankly don't consider RAID-standard TLER/CCTL/whatever several second time limits on physical error handling to be of concern for desktop usage. I've seen enterprise-class hard drives (with those time limits unmodified) be used in single-drive workstations for years.

You have a drive that is (after purchase) spending time reallocating sectors or encountering read errors, its usually on the way to failure. Healthy drives don't have those two values above 0 in SMART ("Reallocated Sector Count" & "Raw Read Error Rate"), as an example. Other imminent failure values such as "Reallocation Event Count" & "Current Pending Sector Count", etc. don't go above "0" on healthy drives either.

Whether limiting such read & reallocation efforts to a few seconds (for "RAID designed" drives) or allowing it to run longer (on consumer drives), the end result is the same. You'll get SMART warnings (or value increases) and its advisable to replace the drive.
 
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I have to agree with Fritingo. I also have worked with RE drives as Main and Secondary drives for several years and not a one has ever had a problem in a normal desktop or workstation environment. I install the RE drives in new computers and say good-by to HD problems.
 
Rembrandt said:
I have to agree with Fritingo. I also have worked with RE drives as Main and Secondary drives for several years and not a one has ever had a problem in a normal desktop or workstation environment. I install the RE drives in new computers and say good-by to HD problems.
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Not to be rude, but you are other one, among many, that thinks, just because you self have no problems, using WD RE or RED drives is a good plan.

Its a Nr's game, and using these drives in general not for what there meant to be used, is just not a good plan, if you need a reliable drive, just take the WD Black, that one is made for the desktop, and uses the same internal mechanism.

Desktop Computers and TLER Effect

Effectively, TLER and similar features limit the performance of on-drive error handling, to allow RAID controllers to handle the error if problematic. In a non-RAID environment, such features are unhelpful, and manufacturers do not recommend their use.
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Its the same as saying that smoking is not bad for you because you and no one you know ever had a problems with it.
And yes its exactly the same, as its the same way of illogical reasoning, just because you have a good or bad experiences with a certain product, dose not mean that that go's in general for these drives.
 
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If the drive cannot correct the error within 7 seconds, which is the standard setting on TLER drives, there is a good chance it will never be able to correctly read that sector. I would rather have the drive report an error immediately than to block all IOs and freeze the system for 30 or more seconds and report the error after that. IMHO having TLER is always better than not having it.

Today I would always buy Red over Green, just because they omitted that useless head retraction function. If my main concern wasn't the high power consumption, I would start to buy enterprise grade harddisks.
 
player-x said:
First of: don't use these WD RED's or RE's with a desktop controller or a NAS or raid controller that dose not have support for TLER
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This statement makes no sense. Controllers don't have TLER, drives do. The nearest meaningful statement would be: "Don't use drives without TLER with controllers that expect it".

These RED's (and the RE's) are mend for dedicated NAS systems or professional raid controllers, using them on a desktop increases the likelihood of HDD errors, as they depend on the controller as part of there error correction.
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I'm gonna attribute it to sloppy writing too but the last part of the statement is wrong as-is. Controllers handle the recovery of the array, they don't "help" with the internal error handling of a single drive. (Only after a drive returned an error, no matter if TLER or not, the controller or a higher software layer might rewrite the faulty block from redundant data. But that's independent from any internal drive error recovery).

Finally, the only situation where a TLER drive used as a standard single drive would produce an error (returned to the OS on read or write request) where a non-TLER wouldn't, is when the drive finds an error that it can't recover from in 7 seconds, but would with more time. The relevance of this scenario is debatable.
 
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you can use a red drive as a main hard drive. it's slow, but you can still do it.
 
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