Difference between revisions of "Western Digital Caviar Black"

From Eugene Eric Kim
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Revision as of 16:42, 19 June 2009

The Caviar Black drives are the highest performance Western Digital drives.

According to the marketing materials, you're not supposed to use these drives in a RAID configuration. Instead, you're supposed to buy the more expensive RAID-specific drives.

The technical difference between these drives is that these drives have Wikipedia:Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) turned off, whereas RAID drives do not. This is a good thing when running non-RAID, but when using RAID, you want the controller to handle the errors, not the drives themselves. With TLER turned off, the drives will timeout and the RAID controller will remove them from the array.

You can turn this feature on using WDTLER.zip, and these drives should work fine in a RAID array. This NewEgg thread has more information. I'm using these instructions to create a DOS-bootable CD (or USB key).