Attack of TLER

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Sovereign

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After some helpful posts from Danny Bui, I learned that serious (hardware) RAID requires a feature called TLER. My WD GreenPower 2TB lacks that feature, so it was recommended I look into either Samsung or Hitachi.

NewEgg just posted a sale on the Hitachi 5K3000 2TB for $59.99 after MIR--does that drive meet the requirement of TLER (also known as CCTL)? I read through the drive specification PDF but really couldn't determine whether the feature is present.
 
I dont have an answer for you regarding TLER on that drive, but since you are sourcing the disks for raid, you are likely looking at buying more than 2. the mail in rebate has a limit of 2. I hate when I miss things like that, so just informing in case you did not see that.
 
Even if I got 2 for $59.99 and one for $69.99, that's better than the current plan of 3 x $79.99 I was going to pay for Samsung SpinPoints. Thanks for the tip though!
 
AFAIK it has experimentally been determined to have a fixed TLER of 7 seconds. In other words, it doesn't officially support TLER but it "should" work as long as your controller has a timeout of at least 7 seconds.
 
Hitachi's acronym for this feature is CCTL, and yes afaik the default on those is fairly low comparatively. Aside from the TLER issue, the other major issue with the WD Green drives is that they park their heads during inactivity and hardware controllers do not like that.
 
WD has a tool for enabling TLER on certain drives. Not sure if your drive will qualify, worth checking out.
 
Correct me if I am wrong, but dont most desktop grade drives all exclude these TLEResque features? I thought you had to purchase RAID edition or enterprise grade drives to get these features like the WD RE-4...
 
ABSiNTH said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but dont most desktop grade drives all exclude these TLEResque features? I thought you had to purchase RAID edition or enterprise grade drives to get these features like the WD RE-4...
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the market seems to be heading in that direction. is not helped at all when WD bought the hitachi drive division and Seagate bought Samsung. anyone who uses either hitachi or samsung drives probably shed a tear when these companies were swallowed up, i know i was (still) upset over the mergers.

it seems silly to completely strip all RAID'able feature from low power spindle drives. the market for home servers / NAS's is only going to get bigger as larger & wider pipes come available to home users.

besides it's not like all companies are going to 'cheap-out' and purchase low rpm drives. they'll still cough-up the bucks for enterprise units for their mission critical stuff. tho i do imagine enterprise units will start incorporating energy saving features in drives to help fit thermal budgets.
 
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What kills me too is that they charge almost 3 times the price for the RAID/Enterprise grade drives, even though it is basically just some extra fw settings (and most likely slightly better quality parts, but still...).
 
yeah, it's not like it's rare that a company milks a product for some extra cash.

it'll most likely get worse in the future as there are only 2 players in the arena now.

the HD manufactures a probably hurting a bit since SSD's entered the scene (prompting mergers, tho there are other market factors at play). make sense they'll create greater delineation amongst their products (low power, mainstream, performance, RAID editions, enterprise, etc) to generate more revenue.
 
Danny Bui suggested these originally: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245

I was just being cheap with my attempt to find other less-expensive drives with TLER/CCTL.

The post linked to confirming lack of TLER/CCTL implies the feature is not necessary though, which is confusing because Danny Bui pretty much said if you want hardware RAID, this feature is a must. Is that true? I don't want to "cheap out" and run risks, but I don't want to buy a product with a price-pumping feature if it's not actually required.
 
you should be fine with either the samsung f4 2TB or hitachi 5k3000 2TB drives.

i'm sure you've already glanced at the 10TB+ thread. many of the forum users have these drives in their hardware RAID setups.

i think the most important thing is the controller. a decent controller shouldn't have issues with either drive.

if you want to pay double for RAID edition drives to be safe, that's up to you.
 
I ended up purchasing 8 RE-4GP drives from Newegg for ~100/ea as they were refurbished when I built my media server earlier this year. Have not had any problems at all. If you do not mind refurbished items, this may not be a bad way to go either. Same warranty as NIB ones, plus they have gone through QC twice and have up to date firmware for the most part. Thought I would mention this as this may help some folks who don't want to shell out 250/pop for enterprise drives like me, but do not mind the refurbished state (as they are almost the same price as desktop grade ones).
 
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ABSiNTH said:
I ended up purchasing 8 RE-4GP drives from Newegg for ~100/ea as they were refurbished when I built my media server earlier this year. Have not had any problems at all. If you do not mind refurbished items, this may not be a bad way to go either. Same warranty as NIB ones, plus they have gone through QC twice and have up to date firmware for the most part. Thought I would mention this as this may help some folks who don't want to shell out 250/pop for enterprise drives like me, but do not mind the refurbished state (as they are almost the same price as desktop grade ones).
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Yeah my room mate bought 2 of the refurbished 2TB WD RE-4GPs for our server to host the VMs, and we have a bet whether one of his will die before one of the 2TB Hitachi 7K2000s that all of the data is stored on. So far, so good for him... He was a bit mad when he realized they were the "green" version when they came in, apparently he didn't notice that part when he ordered them.
 
Yes but they still have TLER which is the main thing for RAID peace of mind, and on the cheap no less :p. When I got my batch of them, I stress tested and benchmarked them for a little bit before throwing them into my production RAID environment, in order to weed out any initial bad apples. I have to say though, knock on wood of course, that I have not had any issues (going on 6 mos now) and I am quite pleased with them...especially for the $$$. The key is to have 1-2 spares on hand for warm and fuzziness in case you have one fail...o_0.
 
Does anyone know if Seagate SV35.5 supports ERC/TLER ? These are video storage oriented drives, I think hitachi has something similar called cinestar.

These are almost as cheap as regular consumer drives but have longer warranty.
 
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