WD Caviar Black Good for Raid0???

[Longspeak]

Seems that I have read on the forum that Caviar Blacks don't play nice in Raid array??

Looking at a pair of 500Gb of either Caviar Black or Samsung F3.

Thanks for your comments.

 

[Emulex]

WD has the RE3/RE4 for raid
Samsung has the "raid" models as well

you know you are doing the right thing when you use raid edition drives in raids; and don't use them in jbod.

 

[Zap]

The potential problem is TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery). Basically when in RAID the drives need to give up on error recovery faster than when not in a RAID array. TLER is native in Raid Edition drives but is disabled in Black Edition drives. However, you might be able to re-enable it using a utility called "wdtler" that you can find online. It is an internal Western Digital utility that wasn't meant to be distributed, but somehow got out in the wild.

I've heard that at least more recently made Green Edition drives can't have TLER enabled, so potentially it doesn't work in any recently made drive.

 

[Viperoni]

I have a pair of 500gb Black's in RAID0, they work pretty well. Sequential Read TR's in the 180mb/s range IIRC. I've had them running like this for about 3 months now.

 

[Emulex]

keep in mind the raid edition are also binned to higher quality standards.

like the velociraptor which is a "lessor binned" version of their enterprise (yeah they do sell sas drives!) drives.

raid-0 is what intel matrix raid is best at doing. the only lenient mode i've seen

 

[bigsnyder]

The only black edition drives that I have seen documented to have problems in Raid 0 was the 1TB model. The 640GB did not exhibit any problems. Check the following site:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2328730,00.asp

As far as other Raid modes, I don't know. I also read somewhere enabling TLER for Raid 0 or Raid 1 was a bad idea, but again might be moot point if you are not interested in either.

 

[Longspeak]

The benchmarks from the extremetech article didn't show the raid0 advantage over a single drive that I expected!

Soo much to learn and so very little time!

Thanks for your comments!

 

[najames]

In Sept did some extensive testing for work with two 1TB blacks and two 640GB blacks. My work was testing small scratch space areas across drives for performance to prove IT was clueless. This was connected to the onboard Intel ports on the Gigabyte EX58-UD4P ICH10R ports, Corei7 920 at stock speeds, Win7 32bit.

RAID0 on two Black 640s using only 50GB on each drive the last line in Atto:
Write=229MB/s
Read=221MB/s

RAID0 on two Black 1TBs using only 50GB on each drive the last line in Atto:
Write=224MB/s
Read=232MB/s

All four connected in RAID0 using only 50GB on each drive the last line in Atto:
Write=421MB/s
Read=493MB/s

For the record I also tried using some blue 640s on the Jmicron contoller and a Syba PCIe controller too. They were much slower than the Intel controller.