[OpenIndiana-discuss] BAD WD drives - defective by design?

[Jason Matthews]

TLER was removed from the consumer drives in one of the rounds of firmware
upgrades. That tunable is now only available in the enterprise versions of
the disk -- at least that is my understanding.

If you have fix it in the OS, it is going to be more expensive. See my last
email on this.


j.

-----Original Message-----
From: John McEntee [mailto:jmcentee at stirling-dynamics.com] 
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 2:35 PM
To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] BAD WD drives - defective by design?

the WD drives have a what WD call TLER, that is a setting that defines 
how long the drive trys to read a bad sector before giving up at 
returning an error. The raid edition does this almost instantly and the 
RAID hardware / ZFS can then decide what to do. The non RAID edition 
retries for a long time before returning and error which result in RAID 
hardware and ZFS thinking the drive is dead an not responding at all.

Search google for WDTLER and download the windows program and see if it 
allows your drive to be changed. I believe WD has stopped it working on 
the latest cheap non RAID drives. For this resaon I by Hitachi, soon the 
only choice will be the WD RAID or Seagate. I am trying to squeeze in 
one last Hitachi upgrade to 3TB in at the moment.

John


On 29/08/2011 22:22, Rennie Allen wrote:
> I think Rich was suggesting using 4k sectors on the file system, not
asking
> what the drives sector size was.
>
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:15 PM, Roy Sigurd
Karlsbakk<roy at karlsbakk.net>wrote:
>
>> All drives have 512b sector sizes, WD FASS (blacks) and WD EADS (greens)
>> both use plain old 512 sectors.....
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> The drives are attached to a backplane?
>>>
>>> Try using 4k sector sizes and see if that improves it - I've seen and
>>> been part of a number of discussions which involved this - and you, I
>>> think, actually.
>>>
>>> - Rich
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
>>> <roy at karlsbakk.net>  wrote:
>>>> Hi all
>>>>
>>>> It seems recent WD drives that aren't "Raid edition" can cause
>>>> rather a lot of problems on RAID systems. We have a few machines
>>>> with LSI controllers (6801/6081/9201) and we're seeing massive
>>>> errors occuring. The usual pattern is a drive failing or even a
>>>> resilver/scrub starting and then, suddenly, most drives on the whole
>>>> backplane report errors. These are usually No Device (as reported by
>>>> iostat -En), but the result is that we may see data corruption at
>>>> the end. We also have a system setup with Hitachi Deskstars, which
>>>> has been running for almost a year without issues. One system with a
>>>> mixture of WD Blacks and greens showed the same errors as described,
>>>> but has been working well after the WD drives were replaced by
>>>> deskstars.
>>>>
>>>> Now, it seems WD has changed their firmware to inhibit people from
>>>> using them for other things than toys (read: PCs etc). Since we've
>>>> seen this issue on different controllers and different drives, and
>>>> can't reproduce it with Hitachi Deskstars, I would guess the
>>>> firmware "upgrade" from WD is the issue.
>>>>
>>>> Would it be possible to fix this in ZFS somehow? The drives seem to
>>>> work well except for those "No Device" errors....
>>>>
>>>> Vennlige hilsener / Best regards
>>>>
>>>> roy
>>>> --
>>>> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
>>>> (+47) 97542685
>>>> roy at karlsbakk.net
>>>> http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
>>>> --
>>>> I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres
>>>> intelligibelt. Det er et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger å
>>>> unngå eksessiv anvendelse av idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de
>>>> fleste tilfeller eksisterer adekvate og relevante synonymer på
>>>> norsk.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
>>>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
>>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>> --
>> Vennlige hilsener / Best regards
>>
>> roy
>> --
>> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
>> (+47) 97542685
>> roy at karlsbakk.net
>> http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
>> --
>> I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres intelligibelt.
Det
>> er et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger å unngå eksessiv anvendelse
av
>> idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de fleste tilfeller eksisterer
adekvate
>> og relevante synonymer på norsk.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>
>
>


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