At 11:19 PM 03/07/2012, James Maki wrote:
If price were no object, I would go with the Black Caviar. I did read that
WD does not support the use of them in RAID. That gives me pause.
That's because WD doesn't implement Time-Limited Error Recovery
(TLER) on any line but their RE line. That means that potentially,
if a drive has a transient failure, it can take longer to recover
than the RAID controller allows, and the RAID controller will drop
the drive. I have never seen this happen with Black drives, but it
is a potential risk (not one that I think is significant, but it's a risk).
Links on this:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
I don't really need the extra speed over the eco drives, but I would like
the reliability. Why can't we get both?
Do you mean, why can't you get low price and high
reliability? Because cheaper components equals lower reliability.
Here are the prices in my local market for WD drives (all 1TB for
comparison purposes).
Blue $124.40
Green $124.40
Black $148.80
RE4 $164.70
So the delta to go Green/Blue to Black is $24.40 or 19%. I don't see
that as a major increase in cost given that you move from 3 year to 5
year warranty plus get a more reliable drive. Even moving from
Green/Blue to RE4 is only $40.30 or 33%. I guess it depends on how
important your data is and how much you value reliability, but I
don't see either of these price deltas as significant enough to stop
anyone from taking the step up to the next level.
T
