Sansung 2TB Echogreen suitable for HW Raid?

tojoski

Weaksauce
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Jun 10, 2010
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Has anyone used these Samsung Echogreen drives in a hardware raid?

I thought I remember seeing people on these forums using these without any form of tler or modification, although I can't find it now.

I know everyone has had generally good results with them for pure storage, although I'm a bit concerned with the smart data from the 2 that I got yesterday. HDD Health reports the drive health at 61% on both drives, and they are new. My WD 1TB drive that is about 1.5 years old still shows at 100%,

What do you guys think?

Device information:
Device ID: 2
Interface: SATA
Device Capacity: 1907726 MB
Serial Number: S1UYJ1KZ311683
Model Number: SAMSUNG HD203WI

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 51 N.A.
2 Throughput Performance 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time 12002 OK 61 61 25 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count 5 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 OK 252 252 10 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate 0 OK 252 252 51 N.A.
8 Seek Time Performance 0 OK 252 252 15 N.A.
9 Power On Time 14 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
10 Spin Retry Count 0 OK 252 252 51 N.A.
11 Calibration Retry Count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
12 Power Cycle Count 5 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
191 G-sense Error Rate 11 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
192 Power off Retract Count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
194 Temperature 36 C OK 64 63 0 N.A.
195 Hardware ECC Recovered 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
196 Reallocation Event Count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
197 Current Pending Sector Count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
198 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
199 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0 OK 200 200 0 N.A.
200 Write Error Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
223 Load/Unload retry count 0 OK 252 252 0 N.A.
225 Load Cycle Count 62 OK 100 100 0 N.A.

i think maybe its the spin up time, as the value for the WD is only 8000, and its been in use for 1.5 years.. 12000 for a new drive seems high..
 
Last edited:
I believe these support CCTL (Command Completion Time Limit) - which works just like TLER on WD drives. I did remember something about the setting not being saved upon power cycles; unlike WD where TLER works across power cycles. Anyone who can confirm this?

If you do hardware, make sure you have CCTL/TLER enabled disks; you need to enable it manually, to about 5 or 7 seconds timeout.
 
Thanks sub.

After adding CCTL to the search I'm coming up with more info.
 
If we're talking consumer grade 2TB drives, older firmware WD EARS drives will support TLER being enabled in the firmware. WD changed the firmware in Oct 2008 to prevent this. I saw some posts that EADS drives could have the firmware changed out with the enterprise firmware, thus enabling TLER, but I'm not sure if that's possible anymore either.

Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, and WD's 2TB can all have CCTL/TLER/ERC (different names for the same thing) enabled via hdat2 or smartctl. This will survive reboots but not power cycles (power loss/power down).
 
Interestingly enough, this doc for the Adaptec 5805 and other 5 series cards, lists the Western Digital EADS and EARS drives as compatible. With no mention of TLER or CCTL.

http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/421154E3-9AE8-4362-B27F-0C49241982A4/0/ARCSASCompatibilityReport_Series5_LowPort.pdf

The 2TB samsungs aren't listed.. but it would seem to me that if the Non-TLER EARS drives work, the samsungs would too.

At first glance I thought, well, sure they are supported just fine in JBOD. But the doc. specifies that they were tested for 24 hours at all raid levels.
 
I have 7 of the samsungs and they seem to work just fine

i am getting some sort of smart error though ,i have no idea how to find out what it is on my 51645 9but only on my 5 newest drives)
 
At first glance I thought, well, sure they are supported just fine in JBOD. But the doc. specifies that they were tested for 24 hours at all raid levels.

If a drive tests without problems for a certain period of time in a test window, they will often certify it. It speaks nothing to the features of the drive itself. A good drive won't even need TLER/CCTL/ERC for most of it's life, because it has no bad sectors where it will get hung up and need TLER/CCTL/ERC to kick in to prevent a RAID volume failure. Unless a drive is bad out of the box, a 24-48 hour test certainly won't show much.

Samsung's are probably not listed for the simple fact that Adaptec hasn't tested them yet.

At the end of the day, manufacturers want to show that their product works with as many drives as possible, and limiting themselves to only enterprise drives deters potential buyers. So if they can had a drive tested across all features of the controller for a 24-48 hour period, they can say "it works fine" and throw it on their list, because, the drive does work fine.

Remember, TLER/CCTL/ERC is drive side error recovery feature, and it's not a requirement for a RAID array of any kind. It's just preferred.
 
I have 7 of the samsungs and they seem to work just fine

i am getting some sort of smart error though ,i have no idea how to find out what it is on my 51645 9but only on my 5 newest drives)

What Raid level are you running? Are you running any form of CCTL?

Have you had any of the drives fail or fall out of the array?


I'd really like to build a big Raid6 array with the 5805/5085 and about 12 of the 2TB Samsungs..
 
I've emailed Adaptec regarding compatibility with non-TLER disks.

I'll let you guys know what they say.
 
It's been 5 days and Adaptec still hasn't replied to my question regarding these drives..

hmm.. not real assuring
 
I have had a drive drop once but that was only because i did 5 or 6 hard resets, i had a faulty DP cable and i though the PC was not booting :(

raid 5

no CCTL
 
I am planning on using 5 of these in a HW raid setup. I already have one bought. Just have to figure out the CCTL situation. If anyone can provide tips on that it would be appreciated.
 
After I called them, I finally received a response from adaptec:

Hello from Adaptec,

this is in answer to your question regarding the Adaptec 5805 SAS RAID controller.
We tested these drives and they passed our tests successfully.
Howevver we understand that TLER may be an issue generally, and we will in the future set more focus on this option while doing our tests in the future, if this may be an issue with a specific drive.

We would not recommend the Samsung HD203WI drives at the moment.
We have seen them in several customer configurations already, and they may show a very high numer of SMART errors, even if the drives are fine and have definitely no hardware issues. The only way then to reset the number of these SMART errors is to replace the drive...

Kind regards

Adaptec technical Support
 
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