3TB Harddisk sale

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 09:58:59PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> My understanding is that RE and non-RE are the same EXCEPT for "TLER"
> (a trivial firmware difference).

I don't know if they are the same or not.

The RE4 has a yellow label with 'Enterprise Storage' on it.  The others
obvious have green, blue and black labels.  I would suspect the yellow
is similar (if not the same) to the black.

They look the same physically, and the specs look the
same, but according to benchmarks the RE4 is faster
than a caviar black in some tests, but slower in others.  At least
according to this:
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Western-Digital-Caviar-Black-and-RE4-2TB-Drives-Review/?page=3

It would seem that while they share the same case and many other
components, they are not the same drive with a TLER setting changed.

Of course the current version of the 2TB caviar black has a 6Gbps SATA
interface, while the current RE4 2TB still uses a 3Gbps interface,
so they are certainly different at the moment.

> 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!

Well it will, but you could have drives fall out of the raid when they
ought not to, which can be rather inconvinient.

> 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.

WD drives used to be switchable with a utility, but no more.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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