3TB Harddisk sale

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Anthony de Boer <adb-SACILpcuo74 at public.gmane.org>

| I expect I'll be trying the WD RE4 Lennart mentions next.

My understanding is that RE and non-RE are the same EXCEPT for "TLER"
(a trivial firmware difference).

Without TLER, RAID won't work.  A drive will spend so much time
recovering from a simple local error that the controller will declare
the whole drive offline.  That is a big failure.  It generally
requires the array to be rebuilt, possibly taking longer than the
actual MTBF!

That's how they do "market segmentation".  Market segmentation is a
vendor's dream: sell essentially the same product at two different
price points.

If the drive manufacturing industry were not an oligopoly, this price
differentiation would disappear.  In fact, I think Samsung's normal
drives were capable of TLER; that's been fixed by Seagate taking them
over.
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