Enabling TLER only necessary with Hardware RAID, or chipset RAID too?

jrichrds

Platinum Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Is the need to get enterprise-class drives or enabling TLER on desktop-class drives only critical when it comes to Hardware RAID? Or is it necessary for chipset RAID (Intel, nVidia, AMD) as well?

I'm deciding between running 2 older 640GB WD Caviar Black drives (TLER switchable) or 2 new 1TB Samsung F3 (can't switch the equivalent of TLER) for a RAID 1.
 

sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
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You need TLER only for non-intelligent RAID engines such as Hardware RAID and Windows onboard RAID; which cannot tolerate a drive from not responding, and messing with the metadata in such a case; i.e. once you reboot you see a split array with some disks being part of a second array.

Booting ubuntu would give you instant access to your data, but many users panic at this point and start trying out alot of things that may destroy data permanently.

If you want your data safe, rely on backups. And perhaps on something like ZFS + Snapshots.

If you want uptime guarantee for mission-critical servers, you really need TLER if you are still using mechanical harddrives; though i would argue for this category an SSD would make alot more sense due to their inherent higher reliability and resilience against LBA timeouts. Thus, a Linux/BSD environment would not need TLER unless you care about uptime; when the system is so important it cannot be offline for just a minute.

Most Windows-based RAID engines just panic whenever a drive does not respond. Linux software RAID and BSD software RAID, including ZFS, is a lot smarter and should never get your broken/split arrays, but rather configurable recovery time.

Using TLER on RAID0/JBOD/single disks (i.e. without redundancy) is a bad idea in all circumstances and can lead to premature dataloss/corruption.