TLER, new WD drives

[Guest]

I have an existing raid 10 array with 750gb se16 drives. I turned TLER on when I got them, and all was right with the world... drive failed, and I replaced it, and TLER can not be turned on with the new drive (caviar black this time)

I also bought 2 caviar green 2tb drives that I set up as a mirror without TLER, and we'll see how that goes...

the question: assuming I cant get TLER on, which WD says I cant, and I am not buying drives that are twice as expensive in order to mirror them, are there settings someplace in intel matrix manager for the ICH10R that would allow me to mitigate the issue of the drives dropping out of the array periodically?

In the future, I am done with western digital unless they have a TLER option again for competitively priced drives... Any thoughts on other manyfacturers that have drives that can be used in RAID arrays?

 

[sub mesa]

Samsung has their comparable system (forgot the name) which still works on the regular desktop class drives as far as i heard.

You may also consider a non-windows dedicated fileserver, so you do not need TLER and won't have broken arrays ever again. If you're a quick learner and in for a new storage experience, try ZFS + FreeBSD. I got some tutorials on how to set that up; check my signature if you're interested.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info... I have my server set up for multiple uses and I am trying to use as little electricity as possible, so I am resisting a seperate box... This TLER nonsense has me terribly angry, however, so it might just be the time to try linux finally.....

If I were to make a FreeBSD server I could host my web pages there too, I assume... but I have a lot of ASP code and flash webpages... Can that stuff be ported to linux, or is it best to start over in that regard?

Thanks again!

 

[sub mesa]

If you want to keep a single system, an alternative would be to run FreeNAS or FreeBSD in a VM solution, like Virtualbox (free and works great). You would need to make 'raw disk access' possible by creating them manually with the "createrawvmdk" command-ilne option. That way, FreeBSD/FreeNAS has direct access to your disks used for RAID.

You could be running ZFS in either FreeNAS or FreeBSD. FreeNAS has the advantage of having a very easy to configure web-interface and pretty much works out of the box. FreeBSD has a newer version of ZFS and can be used as webserver and other uses, too.

About ASP.. well if you could port/rewrite all that with PHP then yes that would work the best on BSD/Linux server. I don't have any experience with ASP(.net) - perhaps it is possible to run ASP on Apache? If you really like ASP i would stay at a Microsoft-based solution, however. If you're still learning, try PHP and if you like it even better it might be worthwhile to rewrite your apps to PHP instead. That's a decision only you can make, of course.