Can anyone with a WD Red drive confirm this?

[fart-missile]

So i plan to put together a NAS later next year but currently need a secondary drive to go with my SSD. I was looking at buying a western digital red since i can toss it in the NAS later but i need to know if the TLER setting can be turned off. I asked western digital and they said theres no way to change the setting. When i mentioned that the anantech article said you could using a program they couldnt give me an answer on whether or not the setting would stick after a power cycle.

Can anyone try or verify that you can change the TLER to zero, power cycle the drive a few times and it will still be zero?

 

[StorageGuru]

Putting TLER to off in a RAID configuration will only result in posible corruption. This is the opposite of the recommended setting. Are you sure you want to do this?
Even in desktop configuration it wont hurt to enable to the setting.

 

[fart-missile]

In desktop i rather have the setting off so the drive can repair itself if it needs to and if it cant then i'll notice. Having TLER on can lead to problems as a single storage drive which is why i asked my original question.

 

[tynopik]

In desktop i rather have the setting off so the drive can repair itself if it needs to and if it cant then i'll notice. Having TLER on can lead to problems as a single storage drive which is why i asked my original question.

1. I'm fairly certain the settings stick
2. If it can't repair itself after 7 seconds, it's not going to

 

[Cerb]

1. I'm fairly certain the settings stick
2. If it can't repair itself after 7 seconds, it's not going to

Long-time recovery is for the normal user with a big vendor box that won't even look into any computer problems until the machine becomes unusable. Taking longer than 7s, it could be well into the thousands of read attempts. Not merely that, but the Red drives perform wear-leveling to prevent the situation where it is needed in the first place.

If you can worry about turning off TLER, you probably need automated backups and/or RAID, instead.

 

[murphyc]

I find it hard to believe the Red SCT ERC value can't be increased from default. As soon as you have a single disk fail in RAID 5, or RAID 1, or two for RAID 6, the remaining drives probably should have higher SCT ERC values set expressly so they do not prematurely produce read errors - which if it happens for sure the array collapses.

The problem with SCT ERC values being "too long" is that controllers didn't have their equivalent error timeout setting to be as long as the disk. So you could have deep recovery for a disk, but then the controller would bail before the disk had conclusively returned correct data OR a read error.

Most people using a NAS probably have software based RAID which will wait for a conclusive response from a drive. So I just don't see the Reds having higher SCT ERC as that big of an advantage for most people who aren't using hardware controllers - OTHER than the fact that the Reds are reasonably priced for the other features and performance they have. Granted, the reduced delay in getting a read error will translate into much faster recovery: even linux software RAID will, on read error, find the data from an alternative source (mirror or reconstructed from parity) and then write that correct data back to the LBA that generated the failed read. That causes the firmware to reallocate that bad sector if it's a persistent write failing sector.

But really, people should be doing scrubs on their arrays. This solves the vast majority of these issues rather than waiting for sectors to get so bad that deep recovery by firmware is even needed in the first place.

 

[murphyc]

This kinda contradicts my point about Reds being reasonably priced for their other features and performance. I actually agree that if the price differential is this small, RE4's are a better way to go.

 

[Cerb]

This kinda contradicts my point about Reds being reasonably priced for their other features and performance. I actually agree that if the price differential is this small, RE4's are a better way to go.

Right now, the Reds are somewhat overpriced. Being that they are going OOS at many online retailers, and are probably being shipped in OEMed products, they can command it...for now.