WD Black HDDs - Not RAID Compatiable????

I just finished a new build and put in 3 WD Black 640GB drives in a RAID 5 config. After about 20hrs of runtime the system indicated a drive failure. Intel Matrix Manager confirmed this so I contacted WD support about getting an RMA. The tech wrote back that these drives and any WD consumer grade drives are not suitable for RAID; here is a quote from the tech:

"The Caviar Black are not RAID edition drives. If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses."

My question to the forum is, am I unable to keep this setup? WD seems to be telling me that. Now I wonder if I will have to redo my system completely and set up 3 individual drives.

Any advice welcome.

Thanks. Bob

I could imagine that officially most consumer HDD manufacturers claim not to suppport RAID and try to sell you enterprise solutions. I have two 750 GB Black Caviar in RAID 1 with no problems. But that doesn't mean much since RAID 1 doesn't strip any data and each HDD "doesn't really know" that it is RAID.

Since Black Caviar is a performance HDD, I would have hoped for some more performance support, like RAID.

Maybe this issue becomes obsolete with SSD used for C: and the HDDs only need RAID 1 for storage anyway.

In all honesty, I'm not a friend of those performance RAIDs anyway. But whichever decision the manufacturer makes regarding support of RAID, they should CLEARLY LABEL that so that users and buyers know about the lack of RAID support.

Especially since WD tries to please the performance crowd they really should take into account that someone who buys a black caviar is likely to use it in a RAID 0 or so. If WD BC was a standard DELL HDD it wouldn't matter since that user doesn't even know what RAID is. but the BC series is used by enthusiasts hat likely RAID for performance.

hope my RAID 1 is not affected... Grrrr.

good there are SSD. Now I think even more that new WD raptor is useless in the age of SSD.

Thanks everyone for the comments. I agree that drives SHOULD be labeled as to their RAID compatability. I guess I will reinstall my OS and programs and reconfigure the drives. A real waste of time but at least I'm getting better at the process.

Bob K

Here is the explanation from WD.

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf

There was a utility to turn on the TLER in the Desktop drives such as the Cavier Black, but I have heard that the new Desktop drives have the feature permanently disabled. WD activates this feature in the RE (Raid Edition) drives.

Jim

FWIW, before you reinstall....
I am running 2 WD Caviar Black's in a RAID-1 setup (no TLER enabled, etc).
Only once did I run into the issue where it reported that a drive had failed (due to TLER, etc etc), but I believe that was more because of the external HD was connected via monitor USB ports and the monitor went to sleep during a file copy - probably confusing the hell out of everything....
atleast that's my guess...
Rebuild resulted in everything back to normal.

WD has been doing this (disabling the TLER util usage for the non enterprise drives), selling the Enterprise drives specifically for RAID etc - personally, the ER drives are too expensive.
Depending on how old your drives are, you may get lucky and they may work or you may have a rather expensive paper weight.

Having said that, to save you some time, do a backup and use the Intel storage manager app to migrate to a RAID-1 (the ICH RAID lets you migrate between RAID types) and keep the third disk for other stuff? or get a 4th drive for 2 RAID-1 setups... assuming you still want the RAID.
Might save you some formatting time...

About five years ago, I had two 80 gb Western Digitals in RAID 0 setup and had absolutely no problems. Maybe Western Digital didn't disable TLER years ago.

I recently purchased 3 WD RE3 drives because:

1. I knew I wanted to setup a RAID and some reviews on Newegg.com mentioned something about TLER and not being compatible with RAID. (Until I read those reviews, I didn't even know what TLER is and I thought all I needed to set up a RAID 0 were two identical hard drives.)
2. They were not much more expensive than other drives but I figured five year warranty is worth paying a few extra bucks.

Purchased 3/30/10
Western Digital RE3 WD2502ABYS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" @ $59.99
Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" @ $159.99

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I WAS WRONG! I had only checked the price difference on 250 GB drives. The price difference wasn't huge between non-RE drives and RE drives for that capacity. I just realized that the 1 TB hard drive was $60 more than the Black Edition. My data drive isn't even set up in a RAID.

Looks like I'll be filing an RMA with Newegg and getting a Black Edition.