Western Digital RE2 WD5000YS

[cybplanet]

Hi folks, I'm new at the forum. I'm from Spain.

I'm Lookin' for a new large hd drive for my desktop and I like those strong WD entreprise drives.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=238

I want for my computer a strong and reliable drive, instead of speed; that is given for all apps with my Raptor unit.

But...this awesome drive lacks the TLER technology, meant for RAID environments, something i'm not interested in. So the drive will be mounted onto a non RAID system, and the problem is that this tecnhology carry more problems than benefits if no raid controller is attached to it. Official Western Digital FAQ:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg...JnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9VExFUg**&p_li=&p_topview=1

Fortunately there is a solution:

From ABXforum:

Not my email. It's someone else's. But here are the instructions for all who need them. From an October 2006 email:


-------

Message from WD:

Thank you for your reply.

Attached is the WD TLER Utility. You?ll need to perform the following steps to disable TLER on our SATA drives.

1.Create a DOS-bootable floppy

Title: Create an MS-DOS Startup Disk
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...s/renken1.mspx

2.Unzip the contents of ?WDTLER.zip? to the boot floppy
3.Insert the boot floppy into the computer with the WD SATA drives
4.Boot the computer off the floppy
5.At the DOS prompt, type ?TLER-OFF? and press ENTER
6.Wait for the program to finish and then remove the boot floppy
7.Restart the computer with the WD SATA drives


Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com

And here is the utility: http://rs11.rapidshare.com/files/2821776/WDTLER.zip

Now the question: Do you think is it interesting to manipulate the firmware with this utility in order to have the drive working fine out of a RAID environment?

Does anyone own the drive and tested it?

Thanks

 

[cybplanet]

Up!

 

[ckevin1]

I own an older 250gb RE disk, the WD2500SD. I've had bad data corruption problems on two occasions in the last 15 months, both times isolated to that disk (of four drives in my system). Both times, it had seemed to be working fine beforehand, but then at some reboot Windows would claim it needed to do file system repair. After the repair, I would find many mangled files throughout the drive. Last time this happened, I lost about 40% of the data on the disk.

I attributed my problems to TLER, and unrecovered errors that might have been handled with no data loss in a normal desktop drive.

Western Digital does not support or give out WDTLER. I contacted their support, and they would not acknowledge that a tool even exists to disable TLER, much less tell me what drive models it was safe to use with. Finally, I gave up and tried it anyway. I've been running for 3-4 weeks now with no problems, but it'll be months before I'm confident in it.

In other words... I don't think the RE drives are worth it!!! An extra 2 years of warranty doesn't mean much if you can't trust the drive. I would never use a RE disk as a main system disk, mine is now relegated to storing downloads -- only items which I can replace in event of another data loss.

If you do buy the RE disk, I would STRONGLY recommend using WDTLER to set it into a normal desktop drive operation mode. However, I don't know how well you can trust the utility, given WD's attitude towards supporting it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Can someone re-post the file on a different download service? RapidShare appears to be dead. Thanks.

 

[Blain]

The FAQ seems to be for the RE. Does the RE2 have the same issue or did WD address it?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have seen the WD website, and it says that the RE2 drives aren't designed for normal desktop use, because of the TLER. Why would soemone get one for a desktop then?

I've never had a problem with them in my RAID configs...

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
I have seen the WD website, and it says that the RE2 drives aren't designed for normal desktop use, because of the TLER. Why would soemone get one for a desktop then?

Quality, Reliability, Warranty...

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
I have seen the WD website, and it says that the RE2 drives aren't designed for normal desktop use, because of the TLER. Why would soemone get one for a desktop then?

Quality, Reliability, Warranty...

Point taken. It just seems to do so when it's features would casue problems, negating the reliability.

 

[cybplanet]

The answer for all types of question "why on a desktop" is just that: Stronger HDD's and reliability.

The next question is: Does it worth the risk for buyin' something that you have to "hack" in order to have it running 100% fine on a desktop?

VirtualLarry:

Rapidshare runs ok. Write me to cybplanet@wanadoo.es, if you keep on trouble. But remember that it would be ilegal distribution of a censored WD utility.


Thanks all. I think it would be a good idea to write WD asking for this or even buy directly the desktop version.

I'will tell one thing more: If the ******' ****** hardware were made as professional products, RMA's would fall many %.

 

[13Gigatons]

Don't have a floppy: http://www.divshare.com/download/645998-e7e

Don't waste a cd-r on this, it's to small I recommend a cd-rw so it can be erased in the future.

 

[Traxus8]

Greetings.

Could anyone please re-post the download for WDTLER? Or maybe mail it to me? Thank you.
Quite a hard to track tool it is.

 

[Roguestar]

sympathy bump

 

[SonicIce]

mirrored
http://users.ameritech.net/hemirich/WDTLER.zip

 

[bigsnyder]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
I have seen the WD website, and it says that the RE2 drives aren't designed for normal desktop use, because of the TLER. Why would soemone get one for a desktop then?

I've never had a problem with them in my RAID configs...

They are fine out of the box for RAID, they are intended to be used in that kind of enviroment.
Disabling TLER is helpful for single drive usage.

 

[RebateMonger]

All of the WD drives are going to have the same error rate, whether they have the RAID firmware or the desktop firmware. The RAID design will warn you faster of developing problems.

So, why would you want the extended error correction, even on a desktop? Drives are cheap and many have long warranties now. Who wants to use drives that are developing errors, anyway? I WANT to know what errors my hard drives are having.

Install the RAID-design drives, make ongoing backups, and if they start showing errors, replace them.

 

[pepsimax2k]

Hi, just wanted to confirm that the WDTLER works on the WD2500SB drive too. That's an IDE RE edition drive, not sure about firmware but the serial number ended in C0 which I think is firmware related (A0 being real early fw editions).

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
So, why would you want the extended error correction, even on a desktop? Drives are cheap and many have long warranties now. Who wants to use drives that are developing errors, anyway? I WANT to know what errors my hard drives are having.

Install the RAID-design drives, make ongoing backups, and if they start showing errors, replace them.

It's the design of the RAID edition HDs, not an "error". The drives aren't bad. It's that they are designed with "Time-Limited Error Recovery"
TLER is designed for data integrity when used with a RAID controller.

The simple solution to use these drives in a non-RAID desktop environment is to disable the "TLER" feature.

 

[j718]

the tler utility works on my 3200aaks (non raid edition drive), i.e. it can read and set both tler values. but who knows whether tler is actually being enabled, or merely that some values the drive doesn't care about are being changed.

i also tried the utility on an older drive (800bb), and it gave an 'unable to access tler values' message.

 

[bigsnyder]

The TLER utility shouldn't work with a BB series drive. TLER basically boils down to this: either allow the drive to do its own
error correction (which is default for most desktop drives, non-enterprise) or allow the interface controller such as a RAID
controller to do the error correction (default for server/enterprise drives such as the RE/RE2 drives). This is why the RE/RE2
drives are not recommended by WD for single drive/desktop use. The TLER utility can allow the RE/RE2 enterprise drives
to act like its cheaper brethren.

 

[j718]

i pretty much knew it wasn't going to work on the bb, but was surprised to see that it worked on my 3200aaks, which is not an re/re2 but an se16. which is odd because tler is mentioned by wd only with respect to re/re2 drives.

 

[bigsnyder]

Thats because the SE16 drives and RE/RE2 drives are basically the same physical drives with different firmware settings.

 

[T-man]

here's the thing, the Raptor is classed as Enterprise on the WD website, so it has the same TLER??!?!?
I sue one as my main drive.....

 

[ViRGE]

The Raptor is a high-performance consumer drive, it does its own error correction. In other words, you'll be fine.

PS Please don't resurrect threads this old. We don't care for necromancers around here

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Can the 1Tb FALS be used in a RAID1 config?

This raised an eyebrow. Not sure what I should do.