Western Digital Red (with TLER) vs Green (with wdidle set to disabled) drives

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snuffy

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I have been reading for about 4 hours now various reviews and experiences with WD Red and WD Green drives.

It appears that TLER is a big deal and should be a priority in choosing drives for a RAID environment. I read several articles about losing the whole array (even with parity RAID options) irrecoverably when using drives without it. The WD Red drives have TLER, the WD Green do not. However, if I'm reading it correctly the WD Green won't have the problem of lacking TLER if wdidle is employed to disable the head docking?

Can anyone advise if my thoughts on this are correct/way off?

My plan is to install on HP Microserver. VMware Esxi booted from flash and run FreeNAS as a VM with 3No. 3TB drives in a RaidZ array. I have a 1TB additional disk for VMs/other. This set up is virtually what I have now except for FreeNAS currently utilises 2No. 1TB drives in a mirrored pair, which I set up just for test purposes.

Kind regards,
Tim.
 

Stephens

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What you've been reading is related to hardware RAID cards and you don't need hardware RAID with FreeNAS. Instead, FreeNAS manages the drives directly and uses your CPU as your hardware RAID controller (though of course the same CPU performs other functions too). Bottom line... TLER is more in the category of "nice to have" for FreeNAS. If I were buying drives today, I'd get Red drives, but that doesn't mean Green one's won't work.

WDIDLE (head loading/unloading) does not address what TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) addresses.
 

HolyK

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Check this thread :)
 

snuffy

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Thanks both, you've helped clear things up for me there. I now feel I have a fuller grasp of the situation and options available. If I can get Red for a comparable price to Green I shall get them, otherwise I'll get the Green and happily use them for my software RAIDZ1 array.
 

averyfreeman

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I read a post that says you can enable TLER for WD Green drives, too.. Have a look here, it explains how to do it --- and also insinuates that the difference between red and green drives may only be this feature being enabled/disabled.
 

coolspot

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It appears that TLER is a big deal and should be a priority in choosing drives for a RAID environment. I read several articles about losing the whole array (even with parity RAID options) irrecoverably when using drives without it.

non-NAS drives work fine in software RAID environments; I've been running Blue/Green/Black, etc. colour drives for years with no ill results. I think TLER is more of a requirement for hardware raid where the firmware on the card less of an ability to cope with timeouts.

However, if the price is the same, I usually opt for the NAS equivalent of the drive, but otherwise I don't sweat it too much.
 

SweetAndLow

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You shouldn't be using raidz1 it's not really a good option in today's world. You should be looking at a raidz2 setup.
 

cyberjock

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Pretty ironic that we're discussing TLER (again I might add)...

If only there was an example of someone that saw the effects of not having TLER with ZFS. If only...

TLER is just as important for software RAID as it is for hardware RAID. The real question is whether you can handle the potential problems that come with not having TLER. If you serve movies and stuff and you can handle it becoming almost unresponsive when a disk starts going bad, then you don't need TLER. If you're going to have wife aggro that is going to make WWII look like a fun ride at a park, then go for TLER.
 
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