From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Christensen Subject: Re: "raid" versions of hard drives for software raid? Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:54:30 -0400 Message-ID: <87tzf8ovll.fsf@uwo.ca> References: <873amsqbag.fsf@uwo.ca> <486BE720.3090507@redhat.com> 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 Brendan Conoboy 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. > > It's a mechanical property- vibration tolerance and whatnot. No > difference between software and hardware raid in this sense. 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 other point is that I also read that TLER can be enabled and disabled for both SE16 and RE2 drives using Windows software. Not sure if it runs under wine. See http://www.hardforum.com/archive/index.php/t-1285254.html Dan