From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Christensen Subject: Re: "raid" versions of hard drives for software raid? Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:34:28 -0400 Message-ID: <87abgzvxxn.fsf@uwo.ca> References: <873amsqbag.fsf@uwo.ca> <486BE720.3090507@redhat.com> <87tzf8ovll.fsf@uwo.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Dan Christensen 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