LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i - WD Red (Intellipower) support

Mastakill

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
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Does anyone know if the LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i support the WD Red line?
More specifically the 4TB one (WD40EFRX).

I guess the most special thing about the WD Red is the Intellipower (variable rpm of the HDD).
According to Anandtech, they do support TLER (default at 7 sec), so they should be fine in that regard...
One other thing is that they are officially only supported in arrays of maximum 5 HDDs, but after calling with WD it became clear that this means that WD only tests them in arrays of maximum 5 and that there is no software or hardware limition enforcing this...

It is not yet in the compatibility list of LSI, so I hope someone here has some experience with it...
 
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I would say the most special thing is having (non-volatile) TLER on a consumer drive. I really doubt that they have variable rpm during normal operation.
They may reduce the rpm while the heads are unloaded, but these drives (or at least the 12 drives I have) have still an unload count equal to the power-on count, so I assume they do not unload the heads during operation.
 
Intellipower is a marketing name for 5X00rpm, there is nothing variable about it.
 
Not sure what to believe now...

When I called WD they explicitly told me that IntelliPower means that the rpm varies between 5400 and 7200 rpm and that this was the most important thing that the RAID controller must support. They told me I should ask for that at LSI (who could not answer this question).

Regarding the head parking:
I actually read that some 4TB WD Reds have head parking enabled by default and other 4TB WD Teds don't, while for example the 3TB WD Reds always have head parking disabled by default.
Anyway: also the head parking can be enabled / disabled (non-volatile), so that is something I would definitely disable if I buy these...
 
I have some reds (mainly 2tb I think) on dell perc 710's, which are rebadged LSI 9265's, they work fine.
 
I dunno about actually supporting/utilizing intellipower (I would think that would be handled internally by the drives vs a controller?) but I have 4X 4TB RED's in RAID5 on on a 9260-8i working great for over 6 months. I wouldn't call it a speed demon but its hard to beat the value as a 12TB volume! It currently functions as a backup / sister server to a medical imaging application. Its already almost 1/2 full and does tons of I/O all day long.
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Just received back the following from LSI... Not very helpful... :/
Hi,

Per engineering, there are no plans to test the WD drive model WD40EFRX.
You have to try it yourself but if the drives support time limited error
recovery, it might work.

Thank you

But thanks A LOT for the useful info dave99 and hardware_failure!!
I might give them a try then...

I'll buy 10... 6 for in RAID 5 and 4 as an offline backup / spare / future expansion.
They will be replacing my 8x 2TB Seagate ST32000542AS, which actually did give me quite some trouble in the end (about once or twice a year timeouts cause a degraded array and they also die very often / quickly)
As the Seagates are also 5900rpm, I don't expect too much of a performance drop..
 
Im in need of some more WD 4TB REDs too... man 10 of them.. that is not going to be cheap!

Depending on your time frame - you might want to wait a few weeks, rumor has it the 5TB REDs should be released soon. Im waiting till then to see how much they are, and also hopefully see if they knock the 4TB price down a bit.
 
Thanks for the tip...

I have just rebuild my 2TB array, so if they hold out a little longer I'll probably postpone buying till after Christmas, when prices hopefully go down a bit...
 
I bought 11 of them about 2 weeks ago.
1 DOA. Failed the extended self test and immediately had reallocated sectors.
Exchanged this one for a working one in meanwhile

Just completed testing them all...

1) They have TLER set to 7 seconds (= ok)
2) They have head parking enabled at 300 seconds (= ok I suppose?)
3) They all passed the short / extended self test
4) They all passed a full write / read surface scan in HDD Sentinel
5) They all have firmware 80.00a80

Didn't try them yet on the RAID Controller.
First I need to backup my data and then I'll start testing in RAID5
 
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