[Solved] Caviar Black 1tb Raid 0

Hi guys, I searched about this in the forums bit didn't find anything.

I wan't to buy this: [url=http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Black-WD1001FALS/dp/B001C271MA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top][/url]
and try to set it in RAID 0, bit ive heard that it has some kind of "extended failure protection" or something that prevents it from being used in any array kind.
Thanks in advance.

My PC is:
XFX Nvidia 790i Ultra Sli
Intel q9300
GSkill DDR3 Ram
XFX Nvidia 250GTS

Reply to robjamar

Best answer

That's not true. The WD Caviar Black can be used in RAID arrays just fine. Just make sure your storage controller is capable of making a RAID array. Otherwise, you'd have to buy an add-on card which supports RAID.

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http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/banner/1027494.png

Yeah my mobo is raid capable, thanks for the help

Reply to robjamar

Best answer selected by robjamar.

Reply to robjamar

From what I've read, recently manufactured Caviar Black drives do NOT support RAID. Google "caviar black tler" using a date range of the past 3 months. Here's a quick overview:

1) (Background info) Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) sheet from Western Digital: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf

2) From the Wiki page for TLER: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- [...] r_Recovery

Quote :

NOTE: the WDTLER.EXE tool is no longer available from Western Digital. WD phone support confirmed that new disks cannot have the TLER setting changed, i.e. RE disks are only suitable for RAID arrays and Caviar are only suitable for non-RAID use. WD also states that using the WDTLER.EXE tool on newer drives can damage the firmware and make the disk unusable.

3) Excerpts from a review written 1-15-2010:

Quote :

WARNING: This drive CANNOT be used in any RAID array, and this cost me over $500 because I ordered five of these for RAID. These drives were getting dropped from the RAID on a weekly basis. Totally unsuitable for use in any RAID array!

Western Digital burned us, sometime in late 2009, when they abruptly changed the firmware so that all versions of these drives now shipping have the Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) setting permanently LOCKED with TLER READ and TLER WRITE both set as DISABLED, so the WDTLER.EXE utility no longer works to toggle TLER to ENABLED. In order to use these drives in a RAID you want to set TLER to ENABLED, but you can no longer do that by any method.

If you dig and dig, you'll eventually find buried in obscure area of the WD website their warning:

"Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or a demanding enterprise environment. If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly...."

Effectively, this decision by Western Digital means that most or ALL of their desktop series drives (shipping late 2009, or later) CANNOT be used in a RAID setup, because the TLER setting will cause these drives to fail on a weekly or daily basis, and there is nothing you will be able to do about it because TLER is now locked.

Reply to mikemcdonald

It's hit or miss, I guess. We bought a couple of WDC Black hard drives recently (2010) and are using them in a RAID1 array. I don't know if setting the drives to RAID0 will break the TLER, but we have been using this for the last 1 1/2 month without issue.

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That's probably the case, it's hit or miss. At stores where the inventory doesn't turn over quickly, the drives in stock might be pre-TLER lockdown. I checked the Caviar Black 1TB box label, no indication of production date. Interestingly, all the drives at Fry's are made in Thailand, whereas all the drives at Micro Center are made in Malaysia. Perhaps the origin makes a difference ... ?

I'd be willing to try two Caviar Blacks with RAID 1 and see what happens. If the second drive fails RAID-wise, no data is lost. But not RAID 0; that could be a world of hurt.

Reply to mikemcdonald

Crap... I just bought 4 for my new system...

Reply to zanraptora

My 3 750GB Caviar Black drives, manufactured 12/9/2009 according to the label, work just fine in a RAID 0 array. I've been running them for 2 weeks now, as of tomorrow.

Reply to dgingeri

gracefully wrote :

That's not true. The WD Caviar Black can be used in RAID arrays just fine. Just make sure your storage controller is capable of making a RAID array. Otherwise, you'd have to buy an add-on card which supports RAID.

gracefully wrote :

That's not true. The WD Caviar Black can be used in RAID arrays just fine. Just make sure your storage controller is capable of making a RAID array. Otherwise, you'd have to buy an add-on card which supports RAID.

Not true. Beginning in late 2009 WD turned off the ability to enable TLER on these drives. Only WD RE drives can now be used in a RAID array. I bought two 1TB Blacks. Came from same egg crate. I could enable TLER on one but not the other. Array was constantly failing.

Message edited by schneid on 02-27-2010 at 07:13:52 PM

Reply to schneid

thanks for all the help, but i allready ordered them from amazon, ill post how things turn out to be.

Reply to robjamar

Best thing to do is Google and download WDTLER. Install it to a bootable floppy. Floppy boot with only one drive connected at a time. One of the .exe's will report the status. If the drives don't you cannot turn on TLER. If you can't turn on TLER, do not use in RAID. You will be very unhappy if you try. Trust me.

If you can't, Amazon will probably pay for the return as WD changed the drive's capabilities w/o warning. The bite the bullet and buy RE's. Amazon has them for $160.

Reply to schneid

ok, im getting my drives today so im going to give that WDTLER a shot because I doubt that they are RE since they cost me only $90.

Reply to robjamar

Yep those should be Blacks. If they are are November or later, I doubt they will TLER. Remember TLER will do all connected drives, so just have one hooked up at a time.

Reply to schneid

I had 3 WD Black drives from Jan of 2009 running in Raid5 for almost a year, then one failed and was replaced with the 2010 version. Since then after rebuild the drive is dropped after 3 or 4 days time. I RMAed the drive and got another 2010 one that has the exact same behavior.

Bit frustrating that they changed things to perform this way, I'm not sure if the other manufactures have a similiar RE version of drives, but I haven't heard of one.

So basically i have 3 1tb drives that I can't use raid on anymore, and I'm not terribly sure how to re-setup my system, as I don't see it hanging on for too long in its current state of a drive being dropped every few days.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to tomatthe

You can try ebay to see if you can find a pre-October drive. Or, bite the bullet and buy RE's for $160 at Amazon. They have TLER ON. I understand Blacks and RE's are the same except for firmware.

Message edited by schneid on 03-03-2010 at 06:20:29 PM

Reply to schneid

WDTLER has the following files:

hdaccess.exe
tler-off.bat
tler-on.bat
tlerscan.bat
wdtler.exe

tlerscan will tell you if you can TLER your drives or not.

Reply to schneid

Link to TLER utility:

http://rapidshare.com/files/2821776/WDTLER.zip.html

Reply to schneid

It seems like this would be affecting more people and there would be a complaints all over the place. I guess if they just changed this as of sometime in 2010 it hasn't hit enough people to be a big deal yet, but I really feel like I got the short end of the stick here.

I'll check them when I get home today, but I get the feeling two of my drives will allow it and the new one isn't going to.

Message edited by tomatthe on 03-03-2010 at 06:29:48 PM

Reply to tomatthe

tomatthe wrote :

I had 3 WD Black drives from Jan of 2009 running in Raid5 for almost a year, then one failed and was replaced with the 2010 version. Since then after rebuild the drive is dropped after 3 or 4 days time. I RMAed the drive and got another 2010 one that has the exact same behavior.

Bit frustrating that they changed things to perform this way, I'm not sure if the other manufactures have a similiar RE version of drives, but I haven't heard of one.

So basically i have 3 1tb drives that I can't use raid on anymore, and I'm not terribly sure how to re-setup my system, as I don't see it hanging on for too long in its current state of a drive being dropped every few days.

I wrote the WD CEO complaining about this issue. I got a phone call. They are empathetic. They made it right with me. I'd give it a shot. They might hook you up with the correct drive or cut you some slack on an RE. Worth 44 cents or a phone call.

Don't deal with their CS. They are third party and don't care.

Reply to schneid

Well i got my drives and succesfully got them to work on raid 0 (no problems yet).
I allready copied and moved like 1.5tb in and out of them and no preblems 'till now, i didnt even use that WDTLER utility thing.

Reply to robjamar

I am new to this and just bought a pair of Caviar Blacks with the hope of running them in RAID 1 for backup with Win7 Pro and Photoshop installed on a SSD. Will RAID 1 work or does this problem only apply to RAID 0?

Reply to candidprints

I tried them in RAID1. Disaster. Ditched them and bought RE's.

Reply to schneid

Wow. I think this is a case of YMMV. Everyone has had different experiences with the 2010 HDs. The best bet is still with the REs.

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It would be nice if someone from Tom's could comment on this or possibly put something on the front page to draw more attention to it, and maybe get a response from WD. The drives I originally got back in Jan of 09 did not need any tools run on them to work right out of the box in Raid 5 without issue. What is the manufacture date on the ones that you have robjamar? The drives that I've had trouble with have manufacture dates of Feb 2010.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to tomatthe

From WD web site:

WD RE3: RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) - Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives. Ideal for servers, storage arrays, video surveillance, and other demanding write-intensive applications.

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

Reply to schneid

The issue isn't that they make the RE drives, it's that only recently did they make some changes which prohibit you from using the nonRE drives in a raid setup. This was not the case when many of us originally purchased them. So now anyone who originally put a raid setup together using the nonRE drives is going to be sol as soon as one of the drives fail because the newer versions won't work as a replacement.

Reply to tomatthe

You will not be SOL. You will just have to pay more money. If your Black fails, you'll have to buy an RE. RE's and Blacks are the same physical drives with different firmware. I have been told RE's pass higher standards than Blacks justifying the price premium but that may just be hype.

Message edited by schneid on 03-04-2010 at 07:58:35 PM

Reply to schneid

Quote :

You will not be SOL. You will just have to pay more money. If your Black fails, you'll have to buy an RE

This would kinda be the definition of SOL to me, forced to spend more money, on something that you should not have to.

Reply to tomatthe

tomatthe wrote :

It would be nice if someone from Tom's could comment on this or possibly put something on the front page to draw more attention to it, and maybe get a response from WD. The drives I originally got back in Jan of 09 did not need any tools run on them to work right out of the box in Raid 5 without issue. What is the manufacture date on the ones that you have robjamar? The drives that I've had trouble with have manufacture dates of Feb 2010.

Where can i see the manufacture date?

Reply to robjamar

Before dumping my Blacks I learned that for TLER to work, DCM ending in CB was the key. CA was bad. AB was up in the air. You can definitely TLER CB's.

Reply to schneid

The manufacture date is on the label on the drive, I can't recall exactly where, but it was pretty easy to find.

Reply to tomatthe

How about other HD Makers (Seagate, Hitachi). Which one of those will work.

Reply to fbelgiovene

AFAIK WD is the only manufacture who's normal drives will not work in Raid Arrays.

Reply to tomatthe

Thank you. That's good to know..

Reply to fbelgiovene

I went round and round with WD for the last 3 or so weeks. They still deny any changes ever being made to the Black drives that would previously allow them to be used in an array and now won't. For what it's worth here is a $15 off $100 purchase coupon if anyone wanted to buy something from their webpage. I definitely won't be buying any WD drives in the future.

m3p8getxh

Reply to tomatthe

I've used tler many times on WD drives before. However, tler is frozen on the newly manufactured drives. The newest examples were intended for RAID 0 apps where speed, not cpacity, was required. Tler failed on:

2 wd6402aaex black drives (these are 640gb with 64mb cache)manufactured March 10, 2010
2 wd5000aads green drives manufactured on Feb 4, 2010.

All are being returned and WD has lost another customer.

zugs

Reply to zugs

Wow, this is good to know (but bad news for me). I too have Caviar blacks, and have had a drive drop from my RAID 10 8 times in 6 mos. I was currently trying IRST as opposed to IMSM, as a possible fix. And I thought the prob was limited to EVGA mobo's.

BTW, the WD TLER utility does not work on 64 bit OS's. Moot for me since I have CA drives (bummer).

Intel Core i7-920 stepping D0 lot 3928A567
EVGA X58 SLI rev SZ2X
Corsair HX3X12G1600C9 SRAM set of 6 (2GB each stick) DDR3 1600 triple-channel memory 9-9-9-24 1.6V
Dual ASUS Radeon HD 5850 in crossfire
WD Velociraptor WD3000HLFS boot drive
Corsair CMPSU-1000HX 1000-Watt Power Supply
Zalman CNPS9900LED CPU cooler (air cooled), Arctic Silver 5
CD/DVD DL combo drive Pioneer DVR-S18MBK
SB X-Fi Titanium Fata1ity Pro SB0880 (PCIe x1)
4: WD 500GB Caviar Black 32MB cache in RAID 10; WD5001AALS-00L3B2
Cooler Master HAF 932 case

Message edited by HalloweenWeed on 04-15-2010 at 07:05:18 PM

Reply to HalloweenWeed

why can we as a comuntiy not just find away to ether down graid the fw or chage it to a re3 it sounds to me like there just disabling things and living the hardware i just got 2 wd black 640s and im not i fear of being a gunipig just need fw and a way to flash ps iv dun bad things with 360s so i do understad flashing

Reply to beastman2008

wow, this was a very old thread. IRST resolved the problem for me, haven't had a RAID dropout since. :hello:

Intel Core i7-920 stepping D0 lot 3928A567
Megahalems W/p-p Excaliburs, AS5
EVGA E758 SZ2Z
Corsair HX3X12G1600C9 2GBx6 1600 9-9-9-24 1.6V
Dual ASUS Radeon 5850 Xfire
Velociraptor 300GB boot
Corsair 1000HX
CNPS9900LED (air cooled), AS5
CD/DVD DL combo drive Pioneer DVR-S18MBK
SB X-Fi Titanium Fata1ity Pro SB0880 (PCIe x1)
4: WD 500GB Caviar Black 32MB cache in RAID 10; WD5001AALS-00L3B2
Cooler Master HAF 932 case

Message edited by HalloweenWeed on 07-03-2011 at 08:21:57 PM

------------------------------ Intel Core i7-920 D0; EVGA X58 SLI E758 BIOS SZ2Z; Corsair XMS3 2GBx6 1600; ASUS Radeon 5850 Xfire;
Velociraptor 300GB boot; Corsair 1000HX; Megahalems p-p; CD/DVD DL; SB Titanium Pro;
4: WD 500GB Caviar Black RAID 10;
Cooler Master HAF 932
Reply to HalloweenWeed