[mythtv-users] Western Digital Red for Myth

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 7:10 AM, Craig Treleaven <ctreleaven at cogeco.ca> wrote:
....
> What say you?

WD Red are primary consumer drives with TLER enabled
(from my perspective, they should enable TLER on the
consumer drives too, but that would prevent them from
making you pay some extra dollars to not disable it in
the firmware(*)).  TLER is important in (true) RAID
environments to allow the controller (hardware or software)
to chose another path/disk to allow faster recovery.

Refer to the google paper on disk drive reliability.  Basically,
drive life is bi-model (they die reasonably quickly, or never),
as long as you do not abuse them (running them hot, for
example).  There are (absolutely) designs with a lower reliability
(and that includes certain enterprise drives), but until the
drives have been "on the street" for awhile, with statistically
significant numbers (and lifetime), you cannot predict which
ones those are.  As another poster has stated, burn the
drive in, and return those that die early.  When possible,
I have always run them for at least a week under constant
activity before I accepted them (both at the enterprise, and
at home).

Gary

(*) Many vendors used to have TLER (or the equivalent)
enabled on their drives until they found (a) they could
charge more to enable it, and (b) people were using
cheap(er) drives in their enterprise arrays, cutting
into profits.  See (a), and (c) some people were
recommending setting to such low values that the
drive was not able to perform normal housekeeping and
(nominal) recovery (false failure rates).