WD RE4 black edition HDs

[toastygoodness]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

Athlon X2 had different core revisions. The early 939 X2s should be comparable to Pentium Ds because that's what Intel had competing with it at the time.

but athlons killed P4s, so it was more of "competing"

[PCBONEZ]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

I don't remember anything about the "SB" series, but I don't see what the advantage would be since IIRC the BB/JB drives accepted SMART TLER commands just fine.

This is how I understand it.

True RAID drives like the SB are less likely to drop out of an array.
Consumer drives like the BB/JB will try to re-read a bad spot too many times causing the RAID controller to 'think' the drive is entirely bad and trip it off line, where as a true RAID drive 'knows' the data is redundant [elsewhere], skips past the bad spot, and remaps and moves the data to a new spot in the background.
.
That's also why using RAID drives when there is no redundancy [stripping only or non-RAID] is a bad idea. They won't try very hard to recover a bad sector. You'd just lose it straight away.

That said: I never used JB's in RAID but the BB's never gave problems.
.

[Uranium-235]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

yeah I forgot about the blue series

I use ich10r onboard raid (mirror 2x velociraptors) for windows and and another raid 1 (2x RE3's) for games. Its good fakeraid for simple redundancy, but I wouldn't use it for raid 5, and not for ANY kind of server/workstation unless its hardware raid

[mockingbird]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

True RAID drives like the SB are less likely to drop out of an array.
Consumer drives like the BB/JB will try to re-read a bad spot too many times causing the RAID controller to 'think' the drive is entirely bad and trip it off line, where as a true RAID drive 'knows' the data is redundant [elsewhere], skips past the bad spot, and remaps and moves the data to a new spot in the background.

Sort of. Before the advent of "raid" drives, almost ALL modern IDE drives accepted smart commands regarding the timeout length of trying to read a weak/defective sector. As soon as the manufacturers understood the demand for RAID - and the fact that IDE was cutting into their SCSI profits - they began to disable support for setting these commands.

Some older drives will accept the commands once but then reset upon boot, so that it has to be input again each time, and some don't accept the commands at all.

"RAID" drives aren't so safe either... When you set the drive up so that weak/defective sector bypass is for 7 seconds, you risk losing that data because of an insufficient number attempts to read the weak sector. Weak sectors are common nowadays because of the way they try to fit all that data on one platter, so an array using this system has its caveats.

In Windows, one has no choice but to use a highly redundant, easily replaceable system à la hardware RAID. The more money you put into it, the more speed you get.

In Linux, you can set up a RAID array using ZFS and not worry at all about any of this because the file system handles all of the sector recovery operations. You can use any old cheap drive as long as it's on an HBA.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

"RAID" drives aren't so safe either... When you set the drive up so that weak/defective sector bypass is for 7 seconds, you risk losing that data because of an insufficient number attempts to read the weak sector. Weak sectors are common nowadays because of the way they try to fit all that data on one platter, so an array using this system has its caveats.

In an array it will be remapped then rebuilt from the other drive.
That's why we have RAID in the first place.
-
The only time that would be a problem is when you use a RAID drive in a non-mirrored configuration.

I suppose if you don't feel secure enough using RAID them you could print everything out,, but your closet is going to get pretty full.
.

[mockingbird]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

There's a better write up about this on a post at Storage Review:

Why don't you want TLER even if your disks are capable?
If you don't need TLER, then you don't want TLER! Why? Well because TLER is dangerous! Nonesense? Consider this:

1. You have a nice RAID5 array on Hardware RAID, being a valuable customer you spent the premium price on TLER capable disks.
2. Now one of your disk dies; oh bummer! But hey i have RAID5; i' protected, RIGHT?
3. So i buy a new disk, and replace the failed one! So easy, ha ha!
4. Oh noooes! A bad sector on of the remaining member disks, and it caused TLER to forfeit; now i got an I/O error during rebuilding my degraded array and the rebuild stopped and i lost access to my data! Arrrrgh!!

The danger in TLER lies that if you lost your redundancy, then if a weak sector occurs that COULD be recovered, TLER will force the drive to STOP TRYING after 7 seconds. If it didn't fix it by then, and you lost your redundancy, then TLER is a harmful property instead of a useful one.

TLER works best when you got alot of redundancy and can swap disks easily, and want disks that show any sign of weakness - if even just a fart - to be kicked out and replaced ASAP, without causing hickups which are unacceptable to a heavy-duty online money transaction server, for example. So TLER can be useful, but for consumers this is more like an interesting way for vendors to make some more money from you poor souls!

[PCBONEZ]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

There's a better write up about this on a post at Storage Review:

I read that article years ago.
[Not the forum post about it, the actual article.]
It was all about why not to use RAID 5.
Which I've never even considered using.
.

[mockingbird]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

The risk is greater, but so are the benefits. If I have a rack in a remote location, I can set up a RAID 6 array with ZFS and never have to go there again for years for HDD problems.

[Uranium-235]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

This is how I understand it.

True RAID drives like the SB are less likely to drop out of an array.
Consumer drives like the BB/JB will try to re-read a bad spot too many times causing the RAID controller to 'think' the drive is entirely bad and trip it off line, where as a true RAID drive 'knows' the data is redundant [elsewhere], skips past the bad spot, and remaps and moves the data to a new spot in the background.
.
That's also why using RAID drives when there is no redundancy [stripping only or non-RAID] is a bad idea. They won't try very hard to recover a bad sector. You'd just lose it straight away.

That said: I never used JB's in RAID but the BB's never gave problems.
.

I think this has has happened to me before actually on one of my velociraptors.

every once in a blue moon the ich screen will have a Driver Error (0) and drop the hard drive. I take it out, put it back in the swap bay and it starts up just fine, rebuilds the array (mirror) and continues normally

[Dammon]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

If you're looking for performance, you should be getting an SSD instead of bothering with RAID.

[BigTroll]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

blue drives give you great quality at a low price

[TBoneit]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

I'll go with the SSD drive for performance, I'm convinced after trying them. I'm finishing a i7 2600 build for my brother with a 160Gb Intel 320 series and 4Gb memory Win7 674bit. The POST is a significant part of the total boot time. I figure 20 seconds to running with A/V loaded timing from when the POST finishes.

I did give him a separate video card and a 1Tb data drive. I migrated my home PC to SSD boot drive too. Much peppier, Much shorter boot time and shut down.

Dang shame they are so expensive.

After reading reviews and seeing all the DOAs and less than a month death on some brands I went with Intel. The data I saw all showed they were more reliable.

The other benefit would be in a laptop, lower power draw and less heat generated. Impact resistance way higher than a Regular drive. That's why I plan to do my Toshiba Dual Core with a SSD, just can't decide to stay 160Gb or go 300Gb = $$$

[Wizard]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

2 reasons. SSD is still above $2-$3 a GB and I refuse to use soft RAID which is what ALL mainboards uses. True raid cards is required and no need for that for what I do as long as I use a good hard drives like Hitachi at 7200RPM and keep partitions small.

Same for others who use TB drives I advise to you yes, you need to partition them into 256GB to 500GB per partitions to speed up the antimalware scanning and performance improved too.

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

If you're looking for performance, you should be getting an SSD instead of bothering with RAID.

SSD RAID

[TBoneit]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

SSD Raid is way to rich for my pocket, I've seen some benchmarks on them and WOW!

[Digital Technophile]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

Damn, where do I begin? Well, a year ago I bought a "future-proof" WD1002FAEX Caviar Black SATA III 1TB drive with a "5-year warranty" for $90 off of Newegg. Proceeded to transfer about 10 years worth of data onto it intending to eventually acquire a second FAEX to mirror the data (generally I feel it foolish to buy two hard drives from the same lot for the reasons you will soon see) with the onboard RAID of the MSI board I was considering purchasing as part of my first ever all new PC build. I figured I had some time, I mean it's Western Digital, right? Wrong; One day I began to hear a strange noise not unlike a fan bearing beginning its death throes (an oddly regular sine wave shaped noise rising and falling in a constant rhythm). The second day I began to grow tired of the noise and decide to investigate. The side cover was already off (I run the shit out of this thing 24x7, and need all the cooling I can get), I poke my head around only to discover that the noise was emanating from my precious HDD! Oh fuck I wondered, I never heard anything like that before. In retrospect, I should have turned off PC, disconnected drive and immediately purchased new drive :sigh: However, I felt it by the sides to see if it was hot, it was not (upper end of what I consider warm. Powered off PC, removed drive, and again holding by the sides, I gently shook it to see if something perhaps had gone loose inside. Nope. So, now like an idiot, I decide to hook it back up and see if it was just a weird occurrence (it's happened to me before with mobo connectors). And that's where the trouble started. Long story short the drive basically became a DC powered paperweight, denying me access to anything on the drive (refusing to initialize).

What to do? Nothing software's going to fix, decided to contact a "data recovery" company to find out how much it's going to cost. Long story shorter, it will cost me $2,024 to get my data back (a 1/3 of which is truly valuable and irreplaceable). BTW the failure was due to a defective head stack (the sweeping arm containing the flying heads that read/write to/from the platters). And why WD decided to store their firmware on the platters is beyond me (oh wait, they were probably trying to save a buck, thanks). So when I hear peoples whines of how many doll hairs per GB SSD's cost, I'm especially quick to ask the question, how valuable is the data you wish to store? For the price of the drive and the cost of recovery I could have had this SSD. Common sense should prevail here.

1st point-I don't give a good goddamn WHO makes the HDD, I will never trust anything beyond a 500GB mechanical hard drive.

2nd-point the more any of these clowns increase their "areal density" the less reliable I perceive it to be. Now they use a micropositioning mechanism in addition to the voice coil store/retrieve data=more complexity=more to fuck up. 2TB on one drive?! How are you supposed to make a BACKup of something that huge? 500 DVD-5's? I'm beginning to think RAID-1 is risky considering the state of mechanical hard drives these days (second IMO only to electrolytic caps), which is why I will save my $$$ for a SSD.

3rd point-The only drive manufacturer I can still trust is WD. But now, I'm sticking with SATA II RE drives <500GB, turning off TLER (google WDTLER) if I decide to use it as a single (foolish?) drive, stress testing the hell out of it, and making hard backups (and backing up those backups, optical media seems sensible though not completely permanent. Precautions need to be taken as well regular testing of stored media.

4th point-PCI-E based SSD is the future of data storage and by supporting the true innovators like FusionIO, STEC, SandForce, Texas Memory Systems, RunCore, and others is the only way of driving the prices down, and letting the Seagates, WDs, Hitachis, IBMs, and others fade away into the annals of history. Oh, you ask, why not buy their SSD offerings? Simple they don't make SSD to innovate, they make them to keep up, hearing the bells tolling in the twilight of rotating platter HDDs. Why do you think Samsung divested their hard drive division? And Intel IMO need to stick to what they do best; CPUs, ICs, and Mobos. If they are commited to SSD technology, then I think they should really look to manufacture high quality flash chips that rival Samsung (perhaps they do already?)

Hopefully I've been as subjective as possible while keeping the ranting to a minimum. And as always I welcome any comments, criticism, and corrections.

[toastygoodness]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

you are right about the 500GB limit. BUT what scares me is that u needed to run your computer with the case open. is your PSU even safe? bad PSUs kill HDs like no other. also, never trust onboard raid, especially on an MSI board, no matter the chipset.

When WDs die though, it is easily recoverable. Usually boot into WinPE or something and just pull everything off, or use linux and DD, making sure you don't mount or mount as readonly.

Samsung doesn't make the best SSDs, not by a long shot. their flash memory in general is pretty lame. I'm a fan of Micron myself, but that may be because i'm from the PNW.

it sounds to me like your problem may lie with other components rather than your HD. usually most drives have been safe for me and i've only had one failed drive over the years. my quantum fireball from over twelve years ago is still functioning today.

[Wizard]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

This is main reason I am not sure of WD.

And my reason I run computers WITH case closed up, if the hard drive bays is poor ventilation, take apart case before building up a PC, I drill neat rows of holes and use the negative air pressure to pull cool air across HDs to keep them cool. Cheap and quiet, extremely effective.

Cheers, Wizard

[Digital Technophile]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

you are right about the 500GB limit. BUT what scares me is that u needed to run your computer with the case open. is your PSU even safe? bad PSUs kill HDs like no other. also, never trust onboard raid, especially on an MSI board, no matter the chipset.

When WDs die though, it is easily recoverable. Usually boot into WinPE or something and just pull everything off, or use linux and DD, making sure you don't mount or mount as readonly.

Samsung doesn't make the best SSDs, not by a long shot. their flash memory in general is pretty lame. I'm a fan of Micron myself, but that may be because i'm from the PNW.

it sounds to me like your problem may lie with other components rather than your HD. usually most drives have been safe for me and i've only had one failed drive over the years. my quantum fireball from over twelve years ago is still functioning today.

Well from a thermal standpoint, I've never liked small block ATX cases, so I tend to run them with the cover off especially if I'm running software that taxes the video card. Coupled with the fact the PSU is a little wimpy (350w) and I'm running 3 hard drives, 2 SATA, 1 PATA (which is my ~8 year veteran Western Digital Caviar WD3200JB, still as quiet as the day I bought it), it tends to be a bit cramped in there.
That WD1002FAEX is also the first hard drive I've ever owned that suffered a mechanical failure...no other component in my rig caused that failure Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back, I should have pulled it, got a new drive and x-ferred the data off of it. It wasn't even my boot drive, could've done right through Windows...had I not handled it excessively and unnecessarily.
Most cars are safe too, until you buy a 2012 model no one's had experience with and find out you bought a lemon. My 1987 BMW 535i however has never left me stranded and is rock solid and reliable. Point being there are always risks involved with bleeding edge technology versus tried and true...I just got burned taking that risk. And had I done my homework, I would have learned that mechanical hard drives will never be able to saturate SATA II bandwidth (even a VelociRaptor)

ANY SATA III mechanical HDD is just hype!

And MSI's never done me wrong (though that doesn't mean they will), and that particular board seems to be well done. And the only onboard RAID I feel is safe for a desktop client is RAID-1, any other modes and I'm reaching for an LSI or Areca card. And even then, if I really need that kind of storage space (and I actually do and should really think about), then out rolls a dedicated file server, preferably something I can repurpose from a board with PCI-E.
As far as Samsung, I wasn't aware they offered an SSD, but I seem to see their memory in just about everything I've gotten my hands on. Yet, I admit that's much like saying Windows is on every computer I get my hands on. The SSD manufacturers I mentioned previously are the only ones I'm really in consideration of at this point.

[Per Hansson]

Re: WD RE4 black edition HDs

Digital Technophile; I just have one correction
Intel DOES make the most reliable SSD's of all, their X-25-M series and the new 320 series has a failure rate of 0.3%
Well below all other SSD makers and also mechanical HDD's
Intel also makes their own Flash chips for the SSD's...

As fore backups, not spreading salt in your wonds but you should of course have them.
If the data is that valuable it should also be stored off-site
Think of the problem of recovering your data if the computer is stolen, is hit by lightning so it is totally beyond recovery, hit by tsunami etc etc etc, there are many possible cenarios for data failure, and I'd wager a guess that not even the majority of them are related to normal failure rate of harddrives...

http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...rns-rates.html