Intel Matrix Storage Controller and Raid Timeout

Converse · 23 Mar 2011

Hi,
I am going to be getting 2 new WD10EALS drives in the next day or so. My plan was to put them in raid using the onboard ICH10R controller on my mobo (an ASUS Sabertooth X58). I had wanted to run WDTLER to turn TLER on, but after reading some reviews it seems I might not be able to as it is reported WD disabled TLER on these drives completely.

Im curious if there is a way to change the timeout for the drives in the matrix storage controller? So if I do have an issue my raid won't die (I'll be using these drives in raid 0 for gaming only). I dont care about the data, I just don't want to have to go thru the hassle of reinstalling the games should a drive get dropped from the array. I am thinking about getting a wd green 2tb drive for backups but just curious if there is a way to change timeout via the controller.

edit: And by change timeout I mean how long the controller waits for the disk before dropping it from the array, like could i set it too 2.5 mins just to be sure?

Hot Rats · 25 Apr 2011

For an architectural overview see wikipedia.org's page on TLER. The idea is to set a RAID disk's TLER to a value that is less than a Hardware RAID controller's disconnect timeout value. On-board Marvel (I believe) and the Intel controllers are not true Hardware RAID, thus AFAIK neither expose nor use a disconnect timeout (:. With or without TLER, when using two disks you can tolerate a fault (such as an outright failure of one disk) by choosing RAID 1. But no fault tolerance can be obtained by choosing RAID 0 (instead you will gain IO performance). With RAID 0 when one disk fails I am afraid everything will be lost

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