Western Digital Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) with RAID and SE, SE16, GP Models

This thread has been a God-send. Special thanks to Dew for the pre-made boot CD, very kind!
 
i had one drop out on me and it had TLER enabled. i am hoping the drive is bad hehe. doing a full media scan using WD's diag tool.
 
I'm a novice with computers, so I have some questions. Due to viruses (even with anti-virus) and both internal and external HD failures, I'm going to setup a NAS. I purchased the Thecus N4100pro to attach to our router and work with an XP desktop (used pretty much as a printer server), 2 XP laptops, 1 Vista laptop, and a macbook pro. I've also purchased 2 1TB WD caviar black (WD1001FALS) to configure in a Raid 1. I know I need to enable TLER before setting up the Raid 1, but how do I do that? In other words, do I need to attach them separately to my computer first and run a utility or can I do that when I install them in the NAS enclosure or how should I do this?

Thanks,
Toni
 
that is the same boot disk i created. the disk works, it just doesn't recognize the drives. I get the menu with the first option being to enable TLER, but then i get the message that no drives found. i'm attaching the drives to my laptop through a usb to sata connector.
 
Does anyone know if Seagate has a similar utility or is it already enabled on their drives? I have four 7200.10 750GB SATA2 in a RAID5.
 
For seagate its called Error Recovery Control or ERC.

But im not sure about a tool.
 
sethh said:
could you please tell me if is this 100% the same as the standard WDTLER application by Western Digital, except in the form of a bootable CD, or are there other modifications as well? should work well with WD1001FALS (the 1TB Black Caviar)?

cheers :)
Click to expand...


The WDTLER in the boot image is equal to the original program.
Yes, WTLER works perfectly with WD1001FALS.
I personally tried on 3 HDD.
 
Hi,

I picked up 4 WD1001FALS hard drives the other day. I tried to run the WDTLER utility on them, but this failed. The application shows the drive and its serial number, however it says it failed to update the TLER read and write settings. (It can't read the setting either).

My SATA controller is running in IDE emulation mode (I can choose, RAID, AHCI or IDE on this Asus M2A-VM HDMI board).

I read the WDTLER utility can be picky on the controller so I also tried it on an Intel 82801 (IHC7 family) on board SATA controller. The same issue here. Connecting a WD1600JS drive worked however... I can see the TLER settings.

My goal was to create a 3TB RAID-5 array. The WD1001FALS seemed a very nice choice to me especially after reading about successful WDTLER stories from other users (also on this forum).

Yes, I know that I should have picked RE edition drives but as a home user I found these too expensive.

Did Western Digital change the rules? The newer WD1001FALS drives no longer support it? Or is it a firmware issue (can't find anything about this either).

Did anybody see this behavior? How can I fix it or should I return the drives and go for the more expensive RE edition WD drives?

Kind Regards,

Erik
 
Kritter,

MDL: WD1001FALS-00J7B1
Date: September 24 2009

Does this make a difference?
 
choas said:
Kritter,

MDL: WD1001FALS-00J7B1
Date: September 24 2009

Does this make a difference?
Click to expand...


My 3 HDD all have:

MDL: WD1001FALS-0?????
Firmware: 05.00K05.
S / N: WD-WMATV2411xxx
Date: Jul 2009

I can not tell you the complete MDL why should I dismantle the huge stack of 8 HDD from the case.

WDTLER works perfectly with these HDD, when connected in IDE mode, to a MB nVidia nForce 590 SLI.
 
No problem :)
Your answer is of great help anyway!
I thought that the 00J7B1 was the firmware version that came with the disks from the factory.
But this is not the case, as I see know.

I should check the firmware version this evening. If I happen to have the incorrect firmware version, is there a way to flash 05.00K05? Probably not since there's not much on Google....

How did you check the firmware? I'm sure my RAID GUI can tell me or otherwise Linux.

I would still love to have these disks in RAID-5 :)
 
choas said:
No problem :)

How did you check the firmware? I'm sure my RAID GUI can tell me or otherwise Linux.
Click to expand...

I checked the fw from "Adaptec Storage Manager". This is the tool for my RAID controller.

Have you checked the label, simply ?
 
Iron67 said:
I checked the fw from "Adaptec Storage Manager". This is the tool for my RAID controller.

Have you checked the label, simply ?
Click to expand...

The problem is that WD support states that "J7B1" is the firmware version.
Which is obviously not true since my Highpoint RocketRaid Manager states that the firmware version is 05.00K05, just as yours.

Funny fact: Highpoint (my raid manufacturer) has the WD1001FALS with firmware "0K05" on their compatibility list.

Since we have the same firmware version, I assume that WD has removed TLER support from this drive as of model WD1001FALS-J7B1.

Currently I'm trying to RMA the 4 drives to the retailer, but since I opened the packages of 3 of the 4 drives they are not sure if they want to take them back. They requested a photo which I've send. I'm waiting for a response.
 
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to re-confirm, TLER works on the WD15EADS and WD20EADS. whenever I get timeout errors (as long as the drive itself hasn't failed), they do not get dropped from the array like they will if TLER is disabled.

on a side note, 4 of 8 WD15EADS i just got all had bad sectors and failed WD diag.

20 of 20 WD20EADS drives have been rock solid for the past 3 months with no errors. 1 of them has a tendency more than the others to have a "timeout error", but again, it's not dropped from the array and there are no media errors. i'll probably replace it eventually if it continues to be the only one to act up.
 
For what it's worth, TLER worked on 16 x WD5001AALS drives. I'm using them with Adaptec 1430SA controllers (RAID1).

I couldn't even get the array builds to complete until TLER was enabled on the drives.
 
WD apparantly dropped the TLER from the 1tb black drives(WD1001FALS). Avoid for raid.
 
Just got a new WD15EADS and TLER will not work anymore. WDIDLE does. Thankfully the card the WD15EADS drives are hooked up to allow me to set the drive timeout up to 999 seconds. LSI SAS3442E-R

This is scary, though, since I have 20 WD20EADS in production on an Areca card where I must have TLER enabled.
 
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production as in holding my files at my house - not a business. 1/2 the price of the Enterprise drives :)
 
I just got 2 new WD15EADS drives, one I am able to turn on TLER and the other I am not. Smaller Raid arrays and a hot spare will have to do if the drive drops out.
 
yeah 1 of 11 of my WD15EADS drives won't allow me to enable TLER. I have 1 more on the way and will be getting 4 more to complete the set once they get back to $100 shipped. again, thanks to the LSI SAS3442E-R I can set the timeout period to 120 to allow non-TLER drives to do their error recovery before they get dropped.
 
If this feature has been disabled in the latest firmware release is it possible to flash an older firmware onto these drives to restore the feature?
 
hmm, I just ordered a WD15EADS from newegg as a spare for my array. Hope this one works with TLER.

Are there multiple versions of WDTLER?
 
Ok this is actually interesting then - look very closely - are there any visual differences between the drives that work and the drives that don't?
 
30th of September manuf date on the P model will NOT support TLER. you look for the 30th Sept part and the P model. The S model is fine.
 
I wonder what the difference on the models are.

So are you saying before Sept 30 all is good, after or on Sept 30 the P model is crippled and the S model is still fine?

What's the difference between the P and S models?
 
I wonder what the difference on the models are.

So are you saying before Sept 30 all is good, after or on Sept 30 the P model is crippled and the S model is still fine?

What's the difference between the P and S models?
Click to expand...

correct.
S model comes with 12.8s WDIDLE time and the size of the drive is slightly different (only differences i know)
 
Dangit!

Local store only has 08 OCT 2009 drives, and all P model. Do you know what the timeout on these models would be?

Anyone know what the Seagate deal is? Are their drives also bad for RAID use like this?
 
Seagates will not work on any controller that would require TLER to be enabled. ONLY enterprise drives would work on those.
 
D'oh...

So if Seagate and WD both cannot have their auto error correction disabled what options do we have?
 
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