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WD RE drives vs regular grade drives for a RAID array?

L

leward

n00b
Joined
Sep 1, 2008
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54
Is there any benefit to using drives such as the WD RE3 enterprise grade drives that are "supposedly" better for RAID arrays versus any regular SATA drive? WD states the RE drives as spending less time trying recover bits on the drive and letting the controller take over so you don't have a higher chance of a drive dropping out an array. But I see lots of people using regular SATA drives in arrays and those RE drives are a somewhat more expensive for the same size drive. I am setting up a server for my home to test virtualization and I want to set up a RAID 1 array with two drives and then another RAID 5 with 3 or 4 drives. I am going to use the onboard LSI 1068E controller for the task (the board is a Supermicro H8DA3-2.
 
To me, a lot of it seems to be marketing for enterprise storage solutions and an excuse to charge higher prices for something that's seemingly the same thing; Seagate ES or WD RE3 drives have a higher rated MTBF rate, though we all know what "MTBF" really translates into in real-life: not what you'd expect. ;)

The enterprise drives do have higher warranties and are qualified for 24/7 drive operation, though I really can't justify what that means considering I've been running "consumer" drives 24/7 for a long time now without any hitches. Must be lucky, I guess. :p

The WD RE3 drives are interesting in the sense that they already have TLER enabled by default so that there'd be less issues regarding RAID dropouts than with their consumer drives due to controller firmware and such, you can turn on TLER for WD drives yourself through WD's "WDTLER" utility, however.

RAID controllers also tend to not list consumer drives for their "compatible drives" lists, though I've used "consumer" drives on my Adaptec 31605 such as the Samsung HD753LJ and now the Seagate ST31500341AS (1.5TB) drive without any compatibility issues. I don't think RAID controller manufacturers would be in some kind of collusion deliberately only supporting enterprise drives only, though I could see the reasons of only listing enterprise drives often in their compatibility lists (to minimize liability).

Now this is just me talking about my personal opinion and knowledge about enterprise drives; a lot of it seems like hocus-pocus marketing to me, though if anyone is willing to shed some light as to the real advantages over consumer drives, I'd be happy to learn some new information on the matter. :)
 
I have 2 WD 500GB I believe they are the blue editionsI was wondering would there be any advantage in setting them up in raid 0 then partioning the raid array into 2 partitions? I wanted to dual boot vista 64 bit and use the other partition to play around with windows7 32bit?
 
I recently put 3 WD 1TB GP consumer grade drives into a Thecus N5200 Nas box in Raid 5 mode. 1 of the 3 drives dropped out of the array during the initial format. I ran the WD diagnostics on it, and it checked out fine. Put it back online and it failed again. It passed the diagnostics again, but I RMA'd the drive to ZZF. When I got the new drive in, I turned TLER on for all 3 drives and it has worked flawlessly for several months now.

So, if you need the peace of mind of buying an enterprise class drive with the 5 year warranty, then spend the extra cash for the RE drives. If money is more of an issue, then get the cheaper drive and turn TLER on if you are going to put them in a RAID 5.

Don
 
Homey D. Clown said:
I have 2 WD 500GB I believe they are the blue editionsI was wondering would there be any advantage in setting them up in raid 0 then partioning the raid array into 2 partitions? I wanted to dual boot vista 64 bit and use the other partition to play around with windows7 32bit?
Click to expand...

Unless you have the NEED of the additional speed of the RAID 0, then I would just install the 2 OS's on separate drives. Specially if you are going to be playing around with a BETA OS.

Don
 
DonDon said:
I recently put 3 WD 1TB GP consumer grade drives into a Thecus N5200 Nas box in Raid 5 mode. 1 of the 3 drives dropped out of the array during the initial format. I ran the WD diagnostics on it, and it checked out fine. Put it back online and it failed again. It passed the diagnostics again, but I RMA'd the drive to ZZF. When I got the new drive in, I turned TLER on for all 3 drives and it has worked flawlessly for several months now.

So, if you need the peace of mind of buying an enterprise class drive with the 5 year warranty, then spend the extra cash for the RE drives. If money is more of an issue, then get the cheaper drive and turn TLER on if you are going to put them in a RAID 5.

Don
Click to expand...

So it using the GP drives is ok then? I thought with the dynamic RPM shifting if the GP drives, that it might cause some weird performance issues.

EDIT: I just read on Newegg reviews that the drive is actually stuck at 5400rpm. I thought it varied between 5400 and 7200 on load.
 
leward said:
So it using the GP drives is ok then? I thought with the dynamic RPM shifting if the GP drives, that it might cause some weird performance issues.

EDIT: I just read on Newegg reviews that the drive is actually stuck at 5400rpm. I thought it varied between 5400 and 7200 on load.
Click to expand...

No, it's just marketing. I don't even think the WD GPs are 5,400RPM, but somewhere "in between", which I guess works in a semantic sort of way by WD claiming "5400RPM to 7200RPM" :rolleyes:
 
leward said:
So it using the GP drives is ok then? I thought with the dynamic RPM shifting if the GP drives, that it might cause some weird performance issues.

EDIT: I just read on Newegg reviews that the drive is actually stuck at 5400rpm. I thought it varied between 5400 and 7200 on load.
Click to expand...

Well, for a Nas box, the network connection or the RAID 5 calculations are usually the limiting factor for performance. The GP drive is plenty fast enough for that. If you were setting up an array to run a huge busy database in a standard server then it prolly wouldn't be my first choice.

From what I can tell for the GP line, they do not say what speed a particular model runs at. It looks like their 5400-7200 spec is across the entire line of drives. To the best of my knowledge, they cannot vary the platter speed, yet.

Don
 
I plan to by four of the above mentioned Hard Disks (WD6401AALS) for RAID 0 together with RAID 5 use (Intel Matrix Storage) and I was just wondering if you were able to enable TLER on them (normally 7s for r/w).

Please post your experience.

I will also appreciate any relative experience from any other user of the above or of the same series drives. :)

agreekboy
 
agreekboy said:
I plan to by four of the above mentioned Hard Disks (WD6401AALS) for RAID 0 together with RAID 5 use (Intel Matrix Storage) and I was just wondering if you were able to enable TLER on them (normally 7s for r/w).

Please post your experience.

I will also appreciate any relative experience from any other user of the above or of the same series drives. :)

agreekboy
Click to expand...

from what i can recall yes it works.

 
agreekboy said:
I plan to by four of the above mentioned Hard Disks (WD6401AALS) for RAID 0 together with RAID 5 use (Intel Matrix Storage) and I was just wondering if you were able to enable TLER on them (normally 7s for r/w).

Please post your experience.

I will also appreciate any relative experience from any other user of the above or of the same series drives. :)

agreekboy
Click to expand...

Remember, TLER limits onboard error recovery to 7 seconds. While that makes the RAID 5 MORE reliable, it will make your RAID 0 LESS reliable as RAID 0 does not have any built in data redundancy. As long as you remember this, and don't store any important data on the RAID 0, you will be just fine. Forget once, and that's when it will hiccup and eat your data. ;)

Don

Don
 
DonDon said:
Remember, TLER limits onboard error recovery to 7 seconds. While that makes the RAID 5 MORE reliable, it will make your RAID 0 LESS reliable as RAID 0 does not have any built in data redundancy. As long as you remember this, and don't store any important data on the RAID 0, you will be just fine. Forget once, and that's when it will hiccup and eat your data. ;)

Don

Don
Click to expand...

not true u have to set the the limit when u type the command "tler.exe /r7 /w7" so in other words u set the limit.

 
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