WD Black HDDs - Not RAID Compatiable????

[BobKuk]

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

 

[HerrKaLeun]

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.

 

[not so gray matter]

I ran across this with a friend a few months ago. Using Black HDDs in a RAID config is not a good idea. Even more so than the drives that don't support RAID yet can be used in that config anyway.

You could try it anyway, I see many people out there have, but I would recommend something thats actually RAID compatible, or atleast unofficially raid compatible.

 

[HerrKaLeun]

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.

 

[pparks1]

I wouldn't run the OS on a RAID 5 array. The parity calculation is going to slow down your performance for all of the very small writes that an operating system is going to do. It's best to run the OS in a RAID1 mirror and have a RAID 5 data partition if you are going to go this route.

 

[BobKuk]

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

 

[Phone Man]

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

 

[Product FRED]

RAID 1 is probably the most effective. If you're looking for speed, install the OS on an SSD, then keep your own files on a normal IDE/SATA drive.

 

[Packet]

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...

 

[wangster]

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

 

[h4mmerdown]

Update to the WD Caviar Black non-RAID support issue

Hello 7 Forums, 1-year lurker new poster here, with an update to this issue.

As an update to this older discussion that is very relevant, I've been experiencing crashes with my 2 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in RAID 1 recently. Symptoms seem consistent with this lack of a TLER. Calling WD Support, they said that even though you can use these drives in RAID 0 or 1 arrays, they are not guaranteed to be flawless. I could barely believe that claim, since I remembered reading from the product descriptions for the drives before I built this system that they specifically had been tested for RAID 0 and 1 compatibility... so I went digging.

HerrKaLeun you would like to see this, based on your post above regarding clearly labelling these drives for this issue. This WD Caviar Black product page here: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701276.pdf specifically claims in the "Applications" section at the bottom of the first page that (and I'll quote):
"Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1)." The publication date on that .pdf sheet is March 2011.

So, are WD incompetent, or lying? They claim up to two months ago that the Caviar Black drives support RAID 0 and 1, but then their tech support claim (one did so to me not 20 minutes ago) that "well, it does work in those, but it cannot be guaranteed to work all the time." In my book, as an engineer with graduate degrees, that means THEY DO NOT WORK.

Imagine if you were running only RAID 0, not RAID 1, and got this "normal" failure? Boom, data loss... and their response would be that "well, they're not recommended for RAID in data-critical applications," even though their own spec-sheet on the drive claims that they're tested for it in the drive's Applications section? Anyone else picking up a lot of cognitive dissonance here?

I've lost a lot of faith in WD today; I found their product support excellent in the past, but this "it works most of the time even though we claim it works perfectly and when it fails it could be catastrophic to your data system" BS is beyond the pale.

Any recommendations for Seagate or Hitachi drives that are known to be RAID 1 solid?