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Western Digital Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) with RAID and SE, SE16, GP Models
- Thread starter JakFrost
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hmm, a tool that is meant for enterprise drives doesn't work on your consumer drive. Good luck with that.
I've been going back and forth via their support system for about a week now.
I still haven't heard back from them since they offered to replace it with an RE Drive...
But I'm in the same boat as you, I can't rebuild my array.. Im thinkin I might do something with ZFS.. not sure yet
Regardless of whether it should have worked or not.. it did.. and western digital disabled it in the middle of the product's lifecycle = wrong
Here's where we obviously differ in opinion:
I feel that regardless of whether or not they intended these drives to be used in Raid or not, they did.. and with TLER they worked pretty well.
Do you really think the fact that TLER was an option to turn on initially was an accident?
For them to disable this on newer versions of the same model is just wrong.. if they want to disable it on future versions.. like the EARS series, thats fine in my book..
But when I RMA a dead WD10EADS that that worked for my needs, and got back a WD10EADS that won't.. That makes me want to start looking for a new drive mfg.
Here's another way to look at this:
What percentage of the enterprise do you think were using these ( EADS ) in arrays?
I'm willing to bet not many.. The people hurt by this are the IT guys like myself that wanted an inexpensive array at home.. I doubt very seriously this was hurting the sales of the RE drives.
There's a reason Microsoft gives software to students real cheap.. because they want them to go to work and use their products..
Then WD tried to pull the card on me that the RE drives are only 15 to 25% more than the green desktop drives.. that is simply not the case.. at Newegg they are roughly 70 - 80% more, and at my distributor they are right at 100% more..
Had they been so close in price, I would use the RE drives in everything simply for the better warranty..
</rant>
I feel that regardless of whether or not they intended these drives to be used in Raid or not, they did.. and with TLER they worked pretty well.
Do you really think the fact that TLER was an option to turn on initially was an accident?
For them to disable this on newer versions of the same model is just wrong.. if they want to disable it on future versions.. like the EARS series, thats fine in my book..
But when I RMA a dead WD10EADS that that worked for my needs, and got back a WD10EADS that won't.. That makes me want to start looking for a new drive mfg.
Here's another way to look at this:
What percentage of the enterprise do you think were using these ( EADS ) in arrays?
I'm willing to bet not many.. The people hurt by this are the IT guys like myself that wanted an inexpensive array at home.. I doubt very seriously this was hurting the sales of the RE drives.
There's a reason Microsoft gives software to students real cheap.. because they want them to go to work and use their products..
Then WD tried to pull the card on me that the RE drives are only 15 to 25% more than the green desktop drives.. that is simply not the case.. at Newegg they are roughly 70 - 80% more, and at my distributor they are right at 100% more..
Had they been so close in price, I would use the RE drives in everything simply for the better warranty..
</rant>
If you are an enterprise customer and buying green drives for mission critical apps then you are a moron. The fact is that they have close to the same firmware for their consumer drives as the enterprise drives. A tool that was available to owners of enterprise drives that was meant to only work with enterprise drives now only works with enterprise drives. WTF is your problem? You bought a drive that wasn't guaranteed to work with TLER and now it doesn't. It's not meant to be run in a RAID array. Tuff shit.
Pretty much what WD had to say, but terrible way to treat your customers.
So what was the motive for them disabling this? They won't answer that.. but we already know why..
To prevent all us rich folk from buying cheaper drives instead of their more expensive ones.. I'm already dreaming up what I'm going to do with the $500 I saved by not buying the RE drives..
I sent back a dead product under warranty and got a lesser product back.. plain and simple.. understand now?
aaronspink
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They gave him a materially different drive as a replacement for the one that failed under warranty. They are fully within their rights to change the functionality of NEW devices but in a defective product scenario, the functionality needs to be the same or better. If not they aren't replacing the failed part with a comparable part, they are replacing it with a worse part. How would you feel if you RMA'd a 1TB drive and got back a 900GB drive?
aaronspink
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The drive does not function to the same specification as the drive he sent in. AKA not the same product. The previous drive was fit for the function it was used for, the new drive isn't, therefore they downgraded him on the replacement, which isn't acceptable.
It's worked for years - are you really being serious here, if so kindly go elsewhere. This is RAID 1 - simple data protection, I don't need to move into another series and spend $$$ on purchasing an additional two drives because my existing drive failed.
aaronspink
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you can try to reason it anyway you like, the simple fact is that the replacement is less functional than the device under warranty.
Agreed - and to be honest this is poor business practice on WD's part. The majority of the costs associated with these enterprise drives aren't even related to their components - I don't need the "enterprise" support or guaranteed product life.
omniscence
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As far as I know WDTLER was never made available to the public by WD, but somehow was leaked. You are using a unsupported, leaked tool to enable a function that the drives were never advertised to have. This is more comparable to using a leaked software key to enable a function that was not paid for.
While I agree that this is a little bit cheap of WD to remove a function that so many users relied on, you can't blame them that they ty to protect their business.
While I agree that this is a little bit cheap of WD to remove a function that so many users relied on, you can't blame them that they ty to protect their business.
aaronspink
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WDTLER was actually made available by WD for customer use both for the blacks and the RE drives. I don't know where this myth came that WDTLER was never made public by WD, you used to be able to email support and they would give you a link for it. IE, it used to be available from their website.
What are the APM features? Why would a green drive not support APM features, my 2TB has 01.00A01 should I update it?
treadstone
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The fact that some of the green drives could be TLER enabled was more or less an oversight on the firmware programmers. The TLER program was made available for the RE drives and NOT for the green drives. From a manufacturing point of view, to bring the cost down (for WD as well as you as a consumer), WD uses the same hardware (sometimes the exact same sometimes with minor differences) along with the same or almost identical firmware. Each drive has a firmware and a configuration file. The configuration file contains the drives capabilities and the firmware reads the configuration file at boot-up and works with these settings. The firmware may support a LOT more features if not every possible feature than what you actually see. It's restricted by the configuration file. The configuration file includes parameters like the drive model number, serial number, disc platters, head count, sectors, features like APM and what specific features within the APM specification it supports, etc.
WDs stand on green drives in RAID was always that they do NOT recommend or support them in this configuration, that's why they have the RE series of drives!
I wouldn't go as far as call him a moron, but in general I agree. This tool was NEVER meant for the green drives. The fact that it did work on the green drives was more or less and oversight on WD part and as you can see from newer drives, they are trying to fix that issue by not letting this tool set TLER on the green drives!
Sorry, but you sent them a WD10EADS drive and you got back a WD10EADS drive. Plain and simple, you got back an identical drive (especially from their point of view). You modified this drive with the TLER tool, which if you read the warranty you will know actually voided the warranty on the drive, and they still sent you a replacement drive which if they knew that you tinkered with it, they didn't have to replace it since your warranty was in fact voided!
Precisely!
Sorry, but I disagree! He sent them a WD10EADS drive and that's what he got back. The fact that he modified it is outside of what the warranty replacement covers.
It does work the exact same way, from the specifications that WD states for the WD10EADS drive. Simply because he changed a setting in the drive that was NEVER meant to be changed in this particular drive doesn't make it a different drive. The fact that he was able to change that setting on the old drive just means that he was lucky to get a drive they forgot to disable that feature in the first place!
QUOTE=danman;1036029617]Sure it does. An after market app that was meant for enterprise drives doesn't work on it. Its not an enterprise drive and the tool was never meant to run on it.[/QUOTE]
+1
You can still run this drive in RAID1 or any other RAID array, with the exception that TLER is not enabled and you may or eventually will run into an issue where the drive will get dropped from the array.
Again, WD is pretty clear on this and states that these drives are NOT intended for use in RAID setups! If you use them in a RAID array then you run the risk of having it fail and you can't blame WD as they told you they don't support this!
Again, see above. It is the EXACT same drive. So he got back what he sent to them. Look at it this way. if he would have never enabled TLER on the original drive and he would have had to RMA the drive, he would have gotten the exact same type of drive back from WD. Would you still have said that the drive wasn't the same or that it was less functional ???
Again, these tools are not meant for the regular green drives. These tools are for the enterprise RAID type drives (RE drives). And yes, the WDIDLE3 program basically defeats the green features of the drives IF you disable that particular feature which means the drive will end up using more power.
Also, that firmware is for enterprise drives NOT for the regular green drives. The fact that it does work on some of the green drives is due to the fact that the hardware is pretty much the same but the configuration data on the green drives is slightly different. So you may or may not be able to change the firmware on the green drives. Just keep in mind that doing this WILL void your warranty!
The additional cost may not necessarily be related to the cost of the hardware but rather the extended warranty and support you get with the enterprise drives.
It was made available to the public at one point but after WD found out that people were misusing this tool by modifying drives other than the RE drives for which the tool was originally made, they pulled it. So you can't blame WD for trying to protect their products.
Correct.
The 01.00A01 firmware does support some APM features. There are a LOT of different APM features, among them are interface power management features and drive related features. If I recall correctly, the 01.00A01 firmware supports the drive APM features but not the interface APM features. The newer firmware versions support both.
danman said:
treadstone said:
- Wrong, The drive I received was a lesser drive.. they disabled a feature that it once supported. regardless of whether or not they intended it to be there in the first place.
treadstone said:
Oversight or intentional, the functionality was there..
treadstone said:
IMHO is the functionality was in that particular drive model, it needed to stay there throughout its lifecycle
treadstone said:
Without TLER these drives WILL fall out of a RAID5 or 6 array.. its just a matter of when, unless you can set the timeout value on your RAID controller
treadstone said:
I simply do not understand your logic here. Its NOT the EXACT same drive.. or we wouldn't be having this discussion would we?
treadstone said:
Yes, If I was aware that the drive I received was of less usefulness than the one I returned.
treadstone said:
Irrelevant.. the tool is used to turn on TLER, the drive I originally had supported TLER
treadstone said:
WD keeps telling me that the RE drives are typically 15-25% more.. as I stated it is simply not true.. or this wouldn't be as much of an issue
omniscence said:
Protect it from whom? They protected themselves out of a home customer and a business customer.. all because some brass hat thought this was cutting into their bottom line.. plain and simple it just couldn't have been.
I buy on average of 2 WD products a week for the last 3 or 4 years.. not anymore
Really, do you guys that are defending them work for them?
I just don't understand how you could defend them in this..
Western Digital obviously knows this has been an issue with many home enthusiasts such as myself, otherwise they wouldn't have been so quick to offer me an RE drive.
What they need to do, is turn the functionality back on that they broke..
No one has touched the subject of the motives of disabling this..It like WD is your football team and you are going to defend them regardless of what they do
What would you have to say, if they released a 1TB hard drive.. that actually had 1TB of usable space, then later they decided this was a mistake and set the usable capacity to 931GB so that they could sell more of their true 1TB drives that were twice as much?
treadstone
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Sorry, but the drive you originally bought and the drive you received as replacement is 100% identical to the published specifications.
Is it the same model? YES
Is the storage capacity the same? YES
Does it perform at the same throughput? YES
...
You messed with a setting inside the drive that first of all was never meant to be messed with and second of all was never and will never be part of the drives specifications as this is a DESKTOP drive and NOT an enterprise drive!
By accident and you messed with it and voided your warranty by doing so. So count yourself lucky that they replaced the drive under warranty!
Again, this was never meant and simply because someone discovered that this actually works on these drives doesn't mean that when WD makes improvements to the drives that this functionality will be there in the future. You could compare this to a security flaw in Windows. Simply because someone discovered this flaw in Windows and uses it to do something that was never intended to be used as and you decided to use the same flaw, if Microsoft decides in a software upgrade to fix this issue then you can't blame Microsoft for changing this. It was NEVER meant to be there or used in the first place!
Of course they will, that's why WD has RE drives! Don't get me wrong, I have 52 WD20EADS drives that I was going to use in a RAID5 or RAID6 setup and I did the same thing and used WDTLER and WDIDLE3 on all of them, but this is NOT supported by either WD or any RAID card manufacturer. They both will tell you that if you run them in a RAID setup, you are on your own!
Uhm , yes it is the same drive. You bought the drive WITHOUT the TLER enabled feature and that's EXACTLY what they send you since they didn't know you messed with this setting!
It may be less useful to YOU since you are using it in an unsupported way.
It's not irrelevant if the tool you are using is and never was intended to be used on this drive! TLER was never and will never be a function on this particular drive.
I agree with you that the RE drives are a bit overpriced and I would love to buy the RE drives over the regular green drives. And if you would have bought the proper drives for a RAID setup, we wouldn't have this conversation
If they would make the TLER function available on the desktop drives, a lot of people would buy the desktop drives, enable the TLER function and use them in a RAID setup (basically what you did) and NOT buy the appropriate (RE) drives for the job. What would be the point of manufacturing the RE drives if you could get away with messing with cheaper drives. And who would pay for the support and warranty if nobody would buy the RE drives?
That's entirely your choice!
No I don't work for WD. I have my own business and I have to deal with warranty issues on a daily basis and know EXACTLY where WD is coming from and why they handle this issue the way they are!
And I would complaint big time to them if they replaced a 1TB drive with a 931GB drive. But lets be honest here, that's NOT what they did in your case, they did replace your defective drive with exactly the same as what you originally bought from them. Your are just ticked at them for disabling a function you messed around with that you were not supposed to be messing around with in the first place!
For the idiots on this thread who have way too much time on their hands and are blinded by reason let me fill you in. There has been so much energy put in some of these posts that you would think these people work for WD CS department and are trying to justify the disabling of TLER on the existing models.
I was very clear with WD support today about the issue, about how I have been running EADS drives that support TLER, how the new replacements did not support them and how because of this I was UNABLE to rebuild my array.
The short of the long - WD has agreed to replace my drives with TLER compatible drives since my existing product supported this and the RMA'd version does not. I would not expect any less of them and as usually WD has been excellent in terms of support and for that reason I will continue to be a reoccurring customer for LIFE.
Let me repeat this again - when you buy an Enterprise drive the higher cost is not associated with the hardware, it's support and testing that goes into the drive before and after it leaves the factory. For my purposes I require the hardware, but do not require the "enterprise" support. When I purchased my drives over a year ago it was well known that this feature was supported and I would expect nothing less today with respect to obtaining a replacement. Neither should you.
Cheers!
I was very clear with WD support today about the issue, about how I have been running EADS drives that support TLER, how the new replacements did not support them and how because of this I was UNABLE to rebuild my array.
The short of the long - WD has agreed to replace my drives with TLER compatible drives since my existing product supported this and the RMA'd version does not. I would not expect any less of them and as usually WD has been excellent in terms of support and for that reason I will continue to be a reoccurring customer for LIFE.
Let me repeat this again - when you buy an Enterprise drive the higher cost is not associated with the hardware, it's support and testing that goes into the drive before and after it leaves the factory. For my purposes I require the hardware, but do not require the "enterprise" support. When I purchased my drives over a year ago it was well known that this feature was supported and I would expect nothing less today with respect to obtaining a replacement. Neither should you.
Cheers!
What about 6 months from now when another one fails? Thats my concern..
WD support has already been gracious enough to offer me an RE drive as replacement this one time.. but what about next time?
I've been looking more and more at ZFS, and it seems this is going to be what drives me to finally dive into it..
WD support has already been gracious enough to offer me an RE drive as replacement this one time.. but what about next time?
I've been looking more and more at ZFS, and it seems this is going to be what drives me to finally dive into it..
aaronspink
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No it isn't the exact same drive, this is in fact self evident. Anyone arguing that it is the exact same drive needs to think a little. Second, it isn't even the exact same specification, the drive sent in supported TLER, the drive sent back did not. What if you bought either an intel or amd processor that supported turbo boost, it failed, sent it in for RMA and they sent you one that varied substantially in its capability such that TB was now only active when 1 core was active instead of when multiple cores were active?
Considering the tool worked on the drives by permanently setting a fully specified part of a register in the ATA specification... If the tool worked, it was meant to work. In fact if anything, drives that can't set TLER are outside of the specification.
WDIDLE3 doesn't defeat the green features of the drives even if you disable the timing. WDIDLE3 only reduces/turns off the rate at which the drive independent of any other factors unloads the heads and spins down. It is still perfectly normal for the OS to do the right thing here. In all honesty, relying on the drive to self park and spin down is bad design, esp if the algorithm is a fixed timing algorithm instead of a dynamic algorithm. Esp considering the limited number of head load/unloads and spinups.
I think we can all agree that the price differential has minimal to do with the hardware. The DOA/IMR of the RE vs non-RE drives appear to be the same(within the margin of error). So it doesn't appear that significantly more pre-ship testing is done on the RE vs the non-RE. They may be doing platter sort into higher grade and lower grade platters. Its certainly likely they do this with the S25 and VR platters. In large part they share the same PCBs between certain models of the RE and non-RE drives. Fundamentally, the firmware is likely the same just with different weightings and capability switches turned on or off.
So yeah, the primary cost differential is likely in the additional 2 years of warrenty or at least it was originally when there was a minor cost differential of ~20% between the drives.
The current cost differential of 2-3x is likely just an issue of profit taking where they can take it.
It wasn't just made available for the REs, there were specific cases where people asked for it for the blacks and it was sent/link sent to them for it.
omniscence
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This is a completely different situation. The processor you bought is advertised as having these features, so you have a right to receive a replacement that also has these features. If you however buy a (3 core) Phenom X3, use the unsupported core unlocking features of some motherboards to make it a quadcore and then the processor somehow breaks, you may get a replacement where you cannot activate the last core. I doubt that you can convince them to send you another X3 processor with 4 working cores.
I am amazed this thread is 86K read. I think it is very simple. I accepted the fact after someone repeatedly explained it to me.
Western Digital officially indicated
1. TLER --> Guarantee RE drives. I think also 10K+ rpm drives (mostly)
2. Other blue/green models, Officially no TLER support. You got lucky if you found one that does.
For consumer, pick you options
A. Accept the fact and move on. use Blue/Green drive and hope for the best with RAID. Some forum members can show you alternative of doing things
B. IF you must have TLER or similar, get RE drives or other vendors similar range of products, I think Seagate / Samsung / Hitachi /misc all have options.
C. (this message is for Western Digital)
If you want TLER strictly for RE, no problem. However, it seems you want people to buy RE drives, yet refuse to give up the business for those TLER-seeking users so there continue to be batches of green/blue with no TLER, and then out of nowhere certain batches with TLER capability. This will hook the bargain seekers and keep them in WD camp with the illusion of getting lucky with WD TLER-drives, and lure bigger crowd seeking oppurtunity
Western Digital officially indicated
1. TLER --> Guarantee RE drives. I think also 10K+ rpm drives (mostly)
2. Other blue/green models, Officially no TLER support. You got lucky if you found one that does.
For consumer, pick you options
A. Accept the fact and move on. use Blue/Green drive and hope for the best with RAID. Some forum members can show you alternative of doing things
B. IF you must have TLER or similar, get RE drives or other vendors similar range of products, I think Seagate / Samsung / Hitachi /misc all have options.
C. (this message is for Western Digital)
If you want TLER strictly for RE, no problem. However, it seems you want people to buy RE drives, yet refuse to give up the business for those TLER-seeking users so there continue to be batches of green/blue with no TLER, and then out of nowhere certain batches with TLER capability. This will hook the bargain seekers and keep them in WD camp with the illusion of getting lucky with WD TLER-drives, and lure bigger crowd seeking oppurtunity
Same here... got a replacement drive from WD with a date code of July 16th. No TLER support... crud
QUOTE=d3vy;1036053075]What a shame. Got 4 new wd20eads drives back from RMA.
Model 00W4B0 production date july 2010. Unable to change/view TLER
On my other 24 drives (00S2B0 / 00R6B0 / 32S2B0) I was able to enable TLER.[/QUOTE]
QUOTE=d3vy;1036053075]What a shame. Got 4 new wd20eads drives back from RMA.
Model 00W4B0 production date july 2010. Unable to change/view TLER
On my other 24 drives (00S2B0 / 00R6B0 / 32S2B0) I was able to enable TLER.[/QUOTE]
I'm pretty sure WD figured out I had a reseller account at my office, and thats why they were being so generous.. although I started the support request just in my personal name.
Today I get the email saying the RE drives had shipped, along with the serial numbers for the drives..
So just for kicks I plug the SN's into WD's warranty checker, and to my surprise they all show just 4 months of warranty!
I'm still waiting on a reply, hopefully they'll reset them to a couple of years.. I had about 2 years left on the EADS drives.
Today I get the email saying the RE drives had shipped, along with the serial numbers for the drives..
So just for kicks I plug the SN's into WD's warranty checker, and to my surprise they all show just 4 months of warranty!
I'm still waiting on a reply, hopefully they'll reset them to a couple of years.. I had about 2 years left on the EADS drives.
so I'm new to the forums I've been long time reader first time poster, i have 9 1.5tb WDEADS and just recently purchased a 3ware 9750 Raid card, with a cenbro 28 port SAS expander board and a norco 4220 case, so i thought all was well until i started dropping drives and read this section about TLER, and my luck none of my drives will do TLER, so i have a few 32meg cache WD20EADS drives that i was able to use WDTLER and adjust the TLER, my first question is what does WDIDLE3.exe do and should i also be running that on the drives? 2nd question is are you still able to buy the patchable WD20EADS or would the ones online come with the latest fw and not able to enable TLER, I'm looking to buy a few more and just not sure if i should take the risk, also what about western-digital-western-digital-2tb-elements-desktop-external-hard-drive-wdbaau0020hbk-nesn these external drives also seem to be 32meg cache drives so I'm wondering if the drive inside is a WDEADS drive inside the unit i need a couple external drives i could buy these and swap them for my un-raidable 1.5's. and my last question is if i were to have 5 TLER enabled WD20EADS drives would anyone see any problem mixing those 5 with 5 Hitachi 2tb drives? from what i read these don't seem to have the problem of dropping form raid correct me if I'm wrong, Thanks
treadstone
Gawd
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WDIDLE3 is used to disable the head auto-parking feature. I think by default the green drives auto-park the heads after 8 seconds of idling. You can see how often one of your green drives has already parked their heads by looking at the head unload counter in the SMART table.
I know of the WD elements drives, but I don't know the answer to your questions as I don't own any of those drives, maybe someone else can help you with that.
I only run WD20EADS drives in my server, so I can't comment on the Hitachi drives either. My brother bought a bunch of the 2TB Hitachi drives (he used WD green drives before) and he told me he's quite happy with them, except that they produce quite a bit more heat than the WD drives used to...
I know of the WD elements drives, but I don't know the answer to your questions as I don't own any of those drives, maybe someone else can help you with that.
I only run WD20EADS drives in my server, so I can't comment on the Hitachi drives either. My brother bought a bunch of the 2TB Hitachi drives (he used WD green drives before) and he told me he's quite happy with them, except that they produce quite a bit more heat than the WD drives used to...
Model 00W4B0 production date july 2010. Unable to change/view TLER
Got 6 more new drives with production date july/august 2010 models 00R6B0 and 00S2B0.
I was able to enable tler on all 6!
lizardking009
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I received another RMA back. TLER enabled fine. Its an 00s2b0 from July.