Re: "raid" versions of hard drives for software raid?

[Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca>]

Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:

>> Dan Christensen wrote:
>>> I'm looking at either the Western Digital 500G RE2 drives or the cheaper
>>> 500G SE16 drives.  I have read that for use with a hardware raid card,
>>> the RE2 drives are more appropriate, and I'm wondering if the same is
>>> true for software raid.
>
> The difference that is most commonly described, and that I should have
> highlighted, is TLER: Time-Limited Error Recovery.  Apparently, the SE16
> drives can take a long time to recover from an error (up to two minutes,
> I believe), and hardware raid controllers can kick the drives out of the
> array when it would instead be better for the drive to return a
> read/write error and let the raid controller deal with it.
>
> My question is really whether this logic applies to linux software raid.

One more reference:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

It certainly sounds to me like TLER is also appropriate for software
raid, so I'm going to go ahead and get the RE2 drives.

Dan