HP Compaq 2710p notebook suffers too many head unloads (fwd)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 02:01:54AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> These drives are not suitable for RAID.  The problem is that error
> recovery done by the firmware takes an unbounded time.  RAID systems
> take that as a sign of the whole drive failing whereas what you
> actually want is the sector to fail and RAID deal with just the sector
> failing.
> 
> If errors happen quickly enough, you don't have time to replace the
> dropped drive and rebuild the array before the next one.  Once you've
> had n such failures (normally n = 2), you are screwed: RAID has run
> out of redundancy and has actually failed.
> 
> WD has a feature to fix this problem: TLER is the name (Time-Limited
> Error Recovery).  They only support it for expensive drives.  Even
> though it is dirt cheap to provide.  Welcome to price discrimination,
> a sure sign of a monopoly market (the 3rd and 4th largest drive
> manufacturers didn't limit this to expensive drives but they got
> bought by the 1st and 2nd).
> 
> The best bet for RAID, AFAIK is the new WD "Red" drives.  Kind of like
> Green but more expensive.

Actually more like blue drives than green as far as I can tell.  Also
rated for 24/7 operation in addition to being raid controller compatible.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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