Need a 2nd HD for RAID 0.

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lodingi

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I currently have a WD 1 TB Caviar Black (Model # WD10000LSRTL). I can grab another 1 TB Black from the egg for $89.00. The model # on that HD is WD1001FALS.

Can I purchase the Newegg HD or do I need to find the exact same model as the current system drive? Thanks.
 
I heard that a lot of drives aren't meant for RAID, and WD Black is one of them. They go into Deep Recovery Cycle that last 2 minutes when encounter error and cause RAID to drop out. Manufacturers usually recommend the more expensive Enterprise versions of the drive for RAID.

The newer 1tb 7200.12 Seagate drive could be better than the rest, for RAID.
 
adobian said:
I heard that a lot of drives aren't meant for RAID, and WD Black is one of them. They go into Deep Recovery Cycle that last 2 minutes when encounter error and cause RAID to drop out. Manufacturers usually recommend the more expensive Enterprise versions of the drive for RAID.

The newer 1tb 7200.12 Seagate drive could be better than the rest, for RAID.
Click to expand...
As Syntax Error stated, the TLER utility eliminates the drive dropping problem on Caviar Blue/Green/Black.

Additionally, I'll take WD's crack firmware team over Seagate's any day. WD does a much better job of optimizing cache algorithms for desktop usage than Seagate does.
 
With Seagate's recent problems with the 7200.11 hard drive, buying Seagate drives now is a crap shoot. I've been looking into WD's drive. Could you tell me a little bit about TLER and crack firmware team? I like the no load technology.
 
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1285254&highlight=TLER

WD puts a "feature" in the firmware of their desktop drives (Caviar Green, Blue, and Black) and presumably their laptop drives as well (Scorpio lines). The drive performs exhaustive recovery of read write errors. On standard single drive storage hosts, this is not a problem. Your typical SATA host detects the drive on startup/POST, then presumes it there until the next reboot. Even if the SATA host knew that a drive had dropped or failed, what good would it do? You would have to power off the system, replace the drive, and restore from backup anyway. RAID controllers work differently. A RAID controller will continually monitor the drive(s) attached to it, as it needs to be able to report a drive dropping or failing so that it can either rebeuild using a hot spare or notify the user that a drive needs to be replaced.

While a Caviar Green, Blue or Black is conducting error recovery, it does not respond to commands from it's host. A generic ATA host doesn't care, it just waits for the drive to respond. However, a RAID controller will only allow a non-responsive drive a certain amount of time before it presumes that the drive has failed and notifies the user of the failure. WD's RE drives, Raptors, and Caviars that have had the TLER enabled place a hard cap on error recovery time, so the drives never time out.

For years, WD did not even acknowledge this as a problem on their desktop drives, while at the same time marketing TLER as a "feature" on their RE drives. Recently, they have acknowledged the problem by allowing customers to download the TLER utility to enable the error recovery time cap on desktop drives. This cap cannot be removed from RE drives.

As for WD's "crack firmware team," as I call them, I can't tell you anything official about them. Cache algorithms are jealously guarded by drive makers and not disclosed for any reason. However, WD's firmware prowess is pretty consistently borne out in application testing (IPEAK traces or application trace timings), even if WD may trail other makers in sythentic seek time / transfer rate benchmarks.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16472/4
 
Thanks for all the good info. So I can purchase the 2nd drive, install this utility & I'm good to go? Hopefully it's that simple. Lol.
 
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