I'm building a home file server and plan to have a 4-drive RAID 5 array. While looking for deals on SATA disks, I ran across Western Digital's RAID Edition drives. The marketing pitch for these seems fairly convincing. The full description from WD is here (note: link is to PDF file), but here is a summarized description:
Most ATA drives are presumed to be for non-RAID dekstop use, and thus each disk is designed to handle it's own error detection and recovery -- rather than relying on a controller to do the error handling. However, error recovery on a normal ATA drive can sometimes take so long that the RAID controller assumes the drive has malfunctioned and marks it dead.
Western Digital claims to have resolved this with its TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) feature in it's Raid Edition disks. These drives presume they are in a RAID array turn over ECC functions to controller in order to eliminate the false failures.
Seems very logical to me. However, I've googled a bit and don't see a lot of discussion on the subject. Moreoever, I don't see any comparable "raid edition" ATA drives from other vendors. With increasing adoption of SATA RAID into the corporate world, and more consumers looking at RAID, I would think other vendors would have competing technologies if the false failures were such a common issue.
Anyone have any experience with this subject? Do all "server class" ATA drives turn over ECC to the controllers, or does WD just have a competitive advantage here? Would you pay a 15% premium for these drives if it were you?
Thanks for any opinions.
Most ATA drives are presumed to be for non-RAID dekstop use, and thus each disk is designed to handle it's own error detection and recovery -- rather than relying on a controller to do the error handling. However, error recovery on a normal ATA drive can sometimes take so long that the RAID controller assumes the drive has malfunctioned and marks it dead.
Western Digital claims to have resolved this with its TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) feature in it's Raid Edition disks. These drives presume they are in a RAID array turn over ECC functions to controller in order to eliminate the false failures.
Seems very logical to me. However, I've googled a bit and don't see a lot of discussion on the subject. Moreoever, I don't see any comparable "raid edition" ATA drives from other vendors. With increasing adoption of SATA RAID into the corporate world, and more consumers looking at RAID, I would think other vendors would have competing technologies if the false failures were such a common issue.
Anyone have any experience with this subject? Do all "server class" ATA drives turn over ECC to the controllers, or does WD just have a competitive advantage here? Would you pay a 15% premium for these drives if it were you?
Thanks for any opinions.
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