Considering WD1001FALS for RAID 0 build but...

B

bigsnyder

Gawd
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Jul 1, 2006
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... this article doesn't paint a good picture for RAID performance with this drive. I am also considering a 640GB blue or black as well, capacity is not my most important concern. If I go by this article, the 640GB drives should serve me best. How much "stock" should I put in those benchmarks? Any insight will be appreciated!
 
I'm also looking into doing this...any feedback would be appreciated.

EDIT: I was reading some Newegg reviews and found this:

Pros: 1TB - If they work they perform fine but nothing spectacular over other 1TB drives.

Cons: These drives run hot but that seems to be the same for most 1TB drives. I'd recommend some direct cooling.
Western Digital does not support running these drives in a RAID configuration. I bought 5 of these drives. 1 was DOA (likely due to shipping as the bubble wrap was popped in areas) and one other will fall out of a RAID set every 2 days. According to WD it is because the drive enters a deep recovery cycle and the RAID controller times it out. Why it needs to enter a deep recovery cycle so often is a question they won't answer. Western Digital wants you to pay more for their RAID edition drives which don't enter the deep recovery cycle. I've never has this problem with other HD manufacturers (before these drives I used mainly Hitachi and Seagate with hardware RAID controllers). I use Areca RAID controllers which have worked great for me in the past. The 3 remaining drives I have work fine but WD won't replace this drive just because it fails in a RAID array.

Other Thoughts: You would think we should be able to run HDs in a RAID array without having to spend extra for a drive designed to operate 24x7 when that is not the intended use.
Here are some of the replies from Western Digital support:

"The WD Caviar Black SATA drive is not a RAID edition drive. When creating a RAID, we recommend that you use our RAID edition drives. We cannot guarantee RAID functionality of our desktop drives for reasons listed in the article below.

Title: What is the difference between Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives?
URL: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1397&p_created=1131638613 "


"It is normal to experience dropouts in RAID arrays with desktop drives. I recommend returning or exchanging the drives to the place of purchase for RAID edition drives, or contact your RAID controller manufacturer to see if they can provide a RAID controller that can see drives that are in a deep recovery cycle. "
Click to expand...
 
I have three 3Ware 9650 raid systems and all of them have works flawlessly with just about any non-raid drive in them. Matter of fact, the only problem I have had with any drives dropping out were WD RE2 (raid) drives. Not a single non-raid drive has ever dropped out. I think you will find manny people here that are using the WD1001FALS in Raid setups are not having any problems at all. The Raid card is the most important factor in what drives can be used with a particular card. WD says the only the RE series will work in a Raid setup but that is not true. For legal reasons and marking reasons, they have to say that they are not intended for Raid setups.
 
First off newegg reviews are bullshit.
Half those people don't actually own the product.
The other half are your avg consumer who don't know what the fuck they are doing in the first place.

If capacity is not your main concern then go with the 640 black. Its the fastest 7200 rpm drive.
Also if you shortstroke them you can get access times close to that of a raptor.
 
@Jon55

I think the TLER utility will take care of that problem of the drive dropping out of the array, but doesn't explain if that is also the cause of the poor performance.
 
There is no poor performance in a Raid or Non-Raid setup in almost any controler out there with these drives.
 
Tler has nothing to do with raid0 it only comes into play when there is parity involved.

If there is no redundancy and hence no parity then there is no error recovery.

If you have a drive dropping from a raid0 then you either have a bad drive or a compatibility issue.
 
that's strange that performance would drop in raid 0... I just ordered 3 of these drives for a Raid 5, I hope it doesn't suffer the same issues. If it does, I wonder if it's possible to flash the WD1002FBYS firmware to it somehow.
 
bigsnyder said:
@Jon55

I think the TLER utility will take care of that problem of the drive dropping out of the array, but doesn't explain if that is also the cause of the poor performance.
Click to expand...

TLER should only be used in a RAID array with data redundancy, such as RAID 5 or 6. It does you no good at all in RAID 0 because if the drive is not able to recover from an error, there is no way to rebuild the data.

TLER will allow an otherwise good hard drive with an occasional data error that is taking more than 7 seconds to recover from that error to stop the recovery process, report the error to the RAID controller, and let the RAID array handle recovery from the error.

TLER should NEVER be used for RAID 0 or on a desktop system. All TLER does is limit the on board error recovery to 7 seconds. It may run fine for a while, but eventually you risk corrupting your data.

Don
 
Thinks for the feedback on the TLER issue. The clarification will be helpful. As far as performance goes, I wonder if it is far-fetched to think Western Digital "crippled" the WD1001FALS drives for RAID use since they offer a RE3 equivilant specifically for RAID? The 640GB variants do not suffer from any performance hit, but they don't offer a RE3 version in this size. Just a theory.
 
bigsnyder said:
Thinks for the feedback on the TLER issue. The clarification will be helpful. As far as performance goes, I wonder if it is far-fetched to think Western Digital "crippled" the WD1001FALS drives for RAID use since they offer a RE3 equivilant specifically for RAID? The 640GB variants do not suffer from any performance hit, but they don't offer a RE3 version in this size. Just a theory.
Click to expand...

The only difference that I have ever heard of between the RE and non RE drives is the fact that TLER is turned on for the RE drives. They have a 5 year warranty so they may put better bearings in the too. But I have never heard of anyone finding a difference in the benches for similar RE and non RE drives.

Don
 
I didn't think so either until I read the article linked in my original post. There is another thread somewhere which Western Digital's support specifically says the WD1001FALS is not intended for RAID. I need to find another source for comparison. Anyway, I have decided to go with the 640GB drives since these are known to perform well in RAID.
 
I'm on the fence about these drives as well. I really like the fact they have a 5 year warranty. The RE3 drives just seem a bit overkill for a media server that serves only 1 person.
 
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