[geeks] the virtualization project

[Shannon]

On Sep 9, 2011, at 11:47 , Nate Raymond wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 8:09 AM, <vintagecoder at aol.com> wrote:
>
>> There have been discussions on WD drives and ZFS. Apparently it has
>> something to do with WD failure modes on their desktop vs. enterprise
>> drives. ZFS does not like anything getting in the way.
>>
>
> In recent years WD has intentionally crippled non-RAID Edition (RE) and
> Black Edition drive firmware regarding TLER:
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery#Western_Digital_Time
_Limit_Error_Recovery_Utility_-_WDTLER.EXE
>
> Also on a lot of WD consumer drives they set extremely short idle timeouts
> for head parking (especially the 'green' drives), which results in
> potentially massive numbers of head parks/unparks during use (i.e. you'll
> find the SMART value Load_Cycle_Count to be excessively high).  For some
> drives this can be relaxed with the WDIDLE utility (something I try to do
> with all WD drives I use).

I've read about that. The WD black drives I have in my server support TLER,
but they are 2 years old now. Two I got recently for a customer were OK as
well, but I've found drives can be hit and miss, which makes it all the more
frustrating.

Its really frustrating because even if a store takes the drives back, you have
no idea if the next ones you buy will have the issue as well.

I have heard of customers in places like Best Buy bring back the little home
servers when the drives they got in the store (upon recommendation by both the
store and the server company) either fail to work or fail prematurely.

Its all preventable too, even on cheap drives.

--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com