Enabling TLER on the WD5000AAKS
For those who are technically deficient I recommend turning away from this post. I’m writing this because I couldn’t find any resources regarding this specific problem. Hopefully the spiders creep up on this and puts it out there to help others who are looking for this solution.
This week, Fry’s Electronics brick and mortar store had the Western Digital Cavier SE16 500GB SATA WD5000AAKS drive on sale for $90 a piece. I picked up two for a RAID 1 configuration only to realize from people all over the Internet that this drive has TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) disabled. This means that the drive self-corrects errors at a much longer time than normal. These drives are considered consumer drives which are designed for the desktop use. Western Digital would rather have the consumer spend more money on purchasing the RE drives which are more for server environments. The difference in TLER means that one that has it disabled, will correct the errors at a longer interval of time (~2 minutes) compared to others that have it enabled and set for a shorter interval of time (usually 7 seconds). This means that if you have a RAID configuration and your drive has TLER disabled, it will take a much longer time to respond if it is in error correction mode and thus tell the RAID controller that your redundant disc array has failed. This is well documented in some customer feedback on the NewEgg product page.
After further digging, I found that other models such as the RE line of drives have this utility for you to change that TLER values. Western Digital offers this utility on a as needed basis. You would have to get in contact with their support to get it. Luckily, I found this posting that had information on getting this. It also has links to creating a bootable jump drive should you need it.
I tested and confirmed that you can enable the TLER using the utility on the WD5000AAKS drive.
Themocracy
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