[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Greg Clifton]

Reaching back into the gray-matter archives, I recall that [some] WD drives
had a problem, many years ago, of dropping out of RAIDs on 3Ware controllers
due to the internal housekeeping causing latencies that resulted in the
drive getting flagged as off line and the array as degraded. They had a
firmware patch that solved that problem AIR and if only applied to IDE
drives (SATA wasn't available yet).
Obviously, you would want to turn off any "green" head parking features on
any drive that is a member of RAID. So if you cannot make the "green" WD
drives "UN-green" by means of some software switch, they would not be
suitable for a RAID system. It is interesting to note that drive RPM is not
mentioned in their specs for the green drives.

GC

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Matty <matty91 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Richard Faulkner
> > <rfaulkner at 34thprs.org> wrote:
> > <snip>
> >> Question for Greg...
> >>
> >> I do not have storage-fixup.conf in FC12....neither do I see it
> available in
> >> package
> >> manager.  Where is a safe source to get it?
> >>
> >
> > The official repo is:
> >
> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tj/storage-fixup.git
> >
> > And you can look through the list of problem drives by looking at:
> >
> >
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tj/storage-fixup.git;a=blob;f=storage-fixup.conf;h=711813339730325cf3ffe4b67af45c83d7f90fbc;hb=refs/heads/master
> >
> > Lots of drives in there, but WDC seems over represented and theirs are
> > the only ones I've seen actually trigger application failure due to
> > failed writes.  (the problem is the drives in this list park the heads
> > excessively and thus can be very slow to respond to i/o activity.  If
> > it takes too long, the kernel can error out the i/o and user space is
> > often not prepared to handle a read or write failure gracefully.)
> >
> > If you have a drive in the list, then with Fedora I can't help.  (I
> > don't know how you would cause storage-fixup to be called during boot
> > and resume under Fedora.)
> >
> > (I'm surprised Fedora doesn't have this packaged.  Suse, Ubuntu, and
> > Arch all do.)
>
>
> A number of folks have also had good luck with the wdtler utility:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery
>
> Do you happen to know if the storage-fixup tool disables TLER on WD
> green drives? It appears TLER causes a fair number of issues.
>
> - Ryan
> --
> http://prefetch.net
>
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