Caviar Blacks and raid

M

M4573R

Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2006
Messages
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I've been seeing things that say the caviar blacks are bad for RAID. I JUST bought a couple 640 gig drives for raid 0 and now I'm reading things saying they're bad. Why is this? I know tons of people are raiding them, but I guess WD says they aren't "Raid Edition" drives.
 
Just enable TLER, it's a hidden feature that's turn off by default on black which the RE edition has enabled.
 
alexlyc said:
Just enable TLER, it's a hidden feature that's turn off by default on black which the RE edition has enabled.
Click to expand...
No, do not do that. TLER should only be enabled for RAID levels involving parity (3-6).
 
Yes only enable it for raid, I should have say that too lol... google TLER and you will see.
 
So is there any performance hit on the caviar blacks compared to the raid editions? I saw some review saying that it sucks with media files or something.
 
The only real difference is TLER being either enabled or disabled (and a higher rated MTBF). Performance should be very similar. There is no 640gb RE drive anyway.
 
Dont enable TLER

TLER stand for Time Limited Error Recovery.
With non-parity raid you dont want this enabled.

Theres like a 30 page thread here on this.
 
i have had 2 640's in raid 0 for months and no issues yet. and they destroy my 36gb raptors in raid 0 and 2 320gb YS raid edition drives in raid.

the raptors and the 320's seem to be about the same speed except the raptors have a faster seek time.

but the 640's showed around 60+mb/s more than my other drives in raid. although i dont know how accurrate the tests were that i run.

im in the process figuring out how i want my raid setup, atm i have 2x 36gb raptors, 2x 320GB, and 2x640gb drives.

i think im going to try and sell my raptors and 320's and see what i can get for them and then try to get 4 more 640's. hopefully i can buy 1 640 with the money i get out of my smaller drives.
 
M4573R said:
So is there any performance hit on the caviar blacks compared to the raid editions? I saw some review saying that it sucks with media files or something.
Click to expand...

It was either wrong or you are remembering wrong.

The blacks are the fastest ones
The Blues are normal
The Greens are low-power

In any case any drive will be fine for streaming HD content as a HD movie will use around 10MB/s peak....most modern drives do around 100MB/s in sequential reads so there is no issue there to be worried about.
 
Does anyone know if the old WD7500AAKS drives and the WD 750GB RE2 drives differ by the TLER as well or is there other difference?

/hijack
 
Sorry to dig up an old thread, but one of my 1TB Black just spontaneously dropped out of an RAID 1 array recently. The hd that was drop out checks out to be perfectly fine through long hour of testing. I think it's because I didn't enable TLER on them...
Good thing I didn't lose anything, it's seems to rebuild just fine. If OP or those who's thinking about doing raid 1 on WD black I suggest you turn on TLER...
 
Like I and everyone else said, do not enable TLER if you aren't using a RAID level with parity. TLER is not to blame for your RAID 1 issues.
 
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