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This has nothing to do with ZFS, but FYI: you can configure consumer-grade Western Digital drives to report failures immediately, rather than retrying, just lik
by dhess 17y ago
This has nothing to do with ZFS, but FYI: you can configure consumer-grade Western Digital drives to report failures immediately, rather than retrying, just like their more expensive "enterprise" counterparts. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery for details. A bit of Googling will turn up the WDTLER.exe binary that you need; make a bootable FreeDOS CD or USB stick, then run WDTLER from the command line to toggle the feature on or off.
Possibly there are other good reasons to buy the enterprise models, but using the cheaper drives is working out for me. I'm running 6 WD15EADS drives with TLER disabled in a software RAID6 configuration on a GNU/Linux machine, and except for the fact that two of the drives failed within hours of first use (the replacement drives work fine), I've had no problems running the array 24/7 for over a month now.
- lsc 17y agoYeah, I have 2 wd 'black' consumer grade drives fixed with WDTLER paired with some seagate ES drives right now. (I mix makes to avoid firmware plagues) I read that WDTLER only works on 1TB and smaller drives. I will have to find some 1.5TB WD drives and experiment. As for the relation to ZFS, it is supposed to timeout ill-behaving consumer drives like this. In fact, from what I understand, you can configure ZFS's behavior, for example, to fail the first drive that times out, and then hang on the second drive (which would perhaps be a reasonable configuration for a ZRAID volume)
- dhess 17y agoWDTLER works on the WD15EADS (1.5TB), as that's what I'm using.