On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Malcolm
Hi I have WD RE3 disks of over 36K Hours, purchased 10 years ago and still running fine, worth the extra few dollars for the enterprise versions...
You're lucky. RE means "raid edition". In a raid array if you have a bad sector you want the drive to fail fast so the raid sub-system can quickly get the data from another drive. Thus you need the firmware to try a sector only once or twice before it gives up and fails. (Each try involves a full revolution or about 9 msecs with a 7200 RPM drive) For a standalone drive, you want that drive to retry and retry and retry in the hopes it can get a good read. It can spend many seconds doing retries before it finally fails a single sector. That's hundreds of retries. The net result of the above 2 criteria is that a RE drive is less reliable than a standard drive, but it is a better choice for a raid array none-the-less. Greg -- Greg Freemyer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org