Many (most?) new consumer drives have support for ERC (the standard term for what WD calls "TLER"), which is part of the ATA-8 standard. See here for the spec (

Many (most?) new consumer drives have support for ERC (the standard term for what WD calls "TLER"), which is part of the ATA-8 standard. See here for the spec (ERC is described in section 8.3.4): http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D1699r4a-ATA8-ACS.pdf http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D169... Until recently, you often needed a vendor-supplied MS-DOS executable to enable or modify ERC features on consumer drives, but smartmontools supports it as of v5.40, thanks to this guy: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/ http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/ I just bought a 1.5TB Samsung HD154UI for $99 that supports ERC. There are reports that P-model variants of the WD 15EADS don't support TLER anymore, but I have several S- and R-model variants of that drive that do, including one that was manufactured in March; so it's still possible to get WD consumer drives that support TLER/ERC, you just have to be picky about the variant.