RedDwarfer said:
" I have contacted Western Digital support and I now have the TLER utility to disable or set the read and write TLER value.
So now that I can disable it, I will now purchase a RE2 500GB drive as soon as I find the best price. The RE2 seems to cost less than the SE16 anyway so with the 5 year warranty it makes it much better value.

- Enable / disable read and/or write TLER.
- Displays current read and write TLER. "

Do you have a location or link to the utility?

Or a phone number to a particular department at Western Digital? I just got off the phone with them and the person I spoke with said there is no utility.

Thanks.

I have contacted Western Digital support and I now have the TLER utility to disable or set the read and write TLER value.
So now that I can disable it, I will now purchase a RE2 500GB drive as soon as I find the best price. The RE2 seems to cost less than the SE16 anyway so with the 5 year warranty it makes it much better value.

- Enable / disable read and/or write TLER.
- Displays current read and write TLER.

A good review but it did raise questions.

I am considering one of the RE2 drives due to the 5 year warranty. I do not intend using Raid and Geoff Gasior mentions in the review disabling the TLER feature but does not say how to do this.

Is it actually possible to do this as it is what is preventing me from purchasing one?

Neither of these drives are editor's choice?

IOMeter response time graph needs to be log scaled on the vertical axis, please?

I am now getting a tad bit scared of the storage size of drives. Mainly because last week I had one of my WD RE2 drives die on me. Total mechanical failure, 250GB of data all gone. The sad thing is I bought the drives in January and have never lost a drive since the deathstar days. I think I'll be switching back to all Seagate drives soon.

Sweet :)

Been waiting for a review of this baby.

Been hugging the fence, thinking of either the 500GB WD or the 320GB Seagate 7200.10.

I'm not too worried about losing data; I try to keep everything backed up.

Besides, last hard drive I had die was a 40MB (yes, MEGABYTE) Seagate in a 12MHz 286...

I have read reports that enabling TLER on RE2 drives in non-RAID environments is actually a good thing. Here is a quote from a forum-user on another forum:

"Why would you want to disable the TLER feature? If after 7 seconds the drive can't read/write the sector, it should report the bad sector to the controller, which will report it to your OS. In turn, your OS will mark the sector bad in the MFT/FAT, then it won't be used anymore.

This is how things should work on ALL drives. But instead, most drives try to hide their bad sectors by 'relocating' the reference to an available 'sparing sector'. Once the small part of the drive reserved for 'spare' sectors is full, then if it's a WD non-TLER drive it will hang the machine because it cannot relocate and will not report. If it's a non-WD drive it will probably report.

Key point: if drives reported all bad sectors from the beginning, you would have an idea how quickly corruption is occuring. Your software would be able to avoid sectors near bad ones, etc. By the time the defect table is full, your drive is in serious trouble. Only so many skeletons can be hidden in the closet.

The ugly truth is this: modern drives develop bad sectors EXTREMELY FAST, due to their high density. To cover this up, manufacturers have uniformly implemented 'defect management', aka. lying to the host controller about spreading bad sectors."

I cannot make heads or tails if the quote is accurate or not. Does anybody want to shed light on this?

A samsung spinpoint is needed for comparisons... Based off of the last WD and Seagate drives, the Samsung is a bit quieter.

FP

Does anyone have a link to the utility that disables TLER? To my knowledge WD has claimed that TLER is user-controllable for a while but haven't released a utility for it yet.

It's not user disable-able if the utility does not exist.

Nice review. Nice looking drive.

My only problem is that Seagate won me over when they went to 5 year warranties across the board. I tend to reward companies that treat me well with my continued support.

So, if the prices were close to the same per GB, i'd buy the 7200.10.
That is just me though.

Some of us only have the benefit of an hour's sleep. Grr.

Excellent review Geoff, as always. I think the RE2's firmware has been tweaked a little for higher concurrency (although it doesn't really show up in IOMeter), whereas the SE16's firmware has been better optimised for streaming transfers. Kinda makes sense, the RE2 is intended for rackmounts etc., where large numbers of independent requests might be expected, whereas a desktop user's requests are likely to be quite highly localised. This advantage is probably diminished with NCQ to be honest though. The loss of 0.2ms on accesses is probably also helping out here.

I think the next time I buy a big hard drive, i'd consider these for their noise properties alone though, because their performance is certainly good enough for what I'd need. It would likely be an external drive so it needs to be pretty quiet.
-Mole

Right on Geoff, a new review. But alas, work bekons to rear it's ugly head in the morning, and I must go off to bed.