WD 2TB Black Drives and Raid

D

DGuterman

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Coming up this week I should be equipping a new server with 8 x 2TB Hitachi HD's in a R6 Array connected to an Areca 1680X/HP SAS Expander. That being said, I have 7 x 2TB WD Black drives, and was curious what people's experiences have been with them, I was considering adding them to my R6 array as well after testing them for awhile on their own array.

So, if you have, had, or used the 2TB WD Black Drives in any type of raid array, although R6 experience is perferred since that's what I will be using, please post it here and let me know.

Thanks!
 
Non RE WD drives have a risk of dropping out of hardware raid cause of lack of TLER feature on them.
How high is that risk? I don't know.
IMO high enough not to consider dumping TBs of data on a possibly knowingly faulty setup from day one.

The way I see it is this: if you spend that much cash for a shiny new R6 server the difference of about 400-500€ should be considered in making the setup work as foolproof as it can!
I only wish that "difference" would come down to about 200-300€
.D
 
I have not seen this happen with their 1TB black drives. I have 7 of them in a linux software raid 5 server for a few months.
 
drescherjm said:
I have not seen this happen with their 1TB black drives. I have 7 of them in a linux software raid 5 server for a few months.
Click to expand...

Those drives were probably manufactured before WD locked the TLER. Good luck if you have to do a RMA because you will get a TLER locked drive.
 
My bet is they have yet to have a failure needing recovery. They are probably 4 months old.
 
I don't think TLER is an issue with mdadm. Not 100 percent on that but I don't think so.

Dustin
 
are you able to use the WDTLER utility on those drives? it lets you enable or disable the TLER function supposedly.
 
The WD Black drives also have less then stellar performance scaling in RAID compared to the WD RAID-Edition drives.

Other then that, as others mentioned, disable TLER on the drives if possible.
 
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