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 koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:14 | reply to daveinpoway
Re: Hard Drive Quality Nosedive in October?said by daveinpoway:Regarding your point #1, perhaps WD could develop a way for the user to access the drive firmware and set the preferences there, instead of using physical jumpers. This is already possible, believe it or not. Many drive features are toggleable through a standard set of ATA commands. For example:
Feature Support Enable Value Vendor
write cache yes yes
read ahead yes yes
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) yes - 31/0x1F
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) no no 31/0x1F
SMART yes yes
microcode download yes yes
security yes no
power management yes yes
advanced power management no no 0/0x00
automatic acoustic management yes no 254/0xFE 128/0x80
As you can see, most of these features are things you can toggle. I know because I extended atacontrol on FreeBSD to support real-time toggling of write caching per drive. Other features are toggleable as well.
Adding a "RAID compatibility" flag is very possible, but again, probably won't be added because of #2. :-)
That said...
Specifically with regards to TLER: a user on the FreeBSD lists informed me that there is in fact a Western Digital utility that lets you disable or enable TLER on your disks. The Wikipedia article even mentions it. You have to ask Western Digital for it, though.
said by daveinpoway:As for your point #2, I agree this could cost WD some revenue. Also, it is possible that the RAID models are somehow better-built. I highly doubt it. A topic on the FreeBSD lists that recurs twice a year is "are SCSI better-made compared to SATA/PATA?" Many clueful people, such as Scott Long (who used to work at Adaptec if I remember right), have more or less agreed on the following:
In the past, this was true. SCSI disks were in fact manufactured differently (different parts used, usually of a higher quality) and the QA process was significantly more thorough -- because SCSI at that time was being used *exclusively* for servers.
Today, as far as I know, SCSI, SAS, SATA, and PATA devices are all manufactured identically. The QA process for them is almost identical (there are differences given that SCSI and SAS have additional capabilities). But as far as I know, the components used in the drives are the same as their less-expensive counterparts. The only difference is the PCB, drive firmware, and interface connector.
So really it's about money. Western Digital probably charges more for "RAID edition" drives, when you're probably getting the *exact same thing* as one of their non-RAID edition drives, just with a differently-tuned firmware. | |
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| said by koitsu:Today, as far as I know, SCSI, SAS, SATA, and PATA devices are all manufactured identically. The QA process for them is almost identical (there are differences given that SCSI and SAS have additional capabilities). But as far as I know, the components used in the drives are the same as their less-expensive counterparts. The only difference is the PCB, drive firmware, and interface connector. That is most likely incorrect -- SCSI drives have to use different parts, if for no other reason that nowadays all new drives spin at 10k or 15k while no SATA drive (exc. Raptors) are made with a 10k spindle motor.
There was a time when some models (i.e. Quantum LP drives) that were identical with the exception of the PCB.
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Put a stick lip on a pig! | |
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