So I'm playing with a retailer's web interface, "building" a virtual system
by specifying the various parts for a proposed home PC build.

I start with an ASUS A8N-E motherboard + AMD 3000 processor.

I ask for a Western Digital SATA 120Gb/7200 RPM/8Mb cache hard drive, and I
get the following pop-up:

"Tech note: Please select this drive ONLY if you will be using in a RAID
array and a 24-7, continuous high duty cycle environment"

How come? Am I missing something totally obvious about putting what looks
to be a fairly basic 120 gig hard drive onto a fairly basic 939 board?

Cheers,

Dom

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc Courteous D <micpowel (AT) bozofilter (DOT) indiana.edu> wrote:
It is probably the time-limited error-correction variant of the drive
that indeed should not be used as a normal drive. Although my present
opinion is thet WD drives should be avoided for low reliability
anyways.

Arno

"Arno Wagner" <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote

Aces, Arno, thanks for the lead. That's exactly the case. Neither "Raid
Edition" nor "RE" were explicitly listed, but following up the model number
reveals that's what it is. New Thing Learned is a Good Thing.

Cheers, mate! Off to investigate reliability....

In message <3sd2rlFmg9fqU1 (AT) individual (DOT) net>, Arno Wagner <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net>
writes
Doesn't sound very impressive!

--
Jeremy Boden

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc Jeremy Boden <jeremy (AT) jboden (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote:
It is not: The drive tries to re-read an unreadable sector
for a short and limited time only (a few seconds) instead of
the longer time a standard drive tries. The idea is that some
RAID controllers will classify a drive as unusable if it does
not respond for a time.

Why this makes sense is beyond me. Linux software RAID (which
I use) will classify a drive as broken if it reports unreadable
sectors as well and kicks it from the array. It seems some
RAID controllers consider a mere unreadable sector not as a
real problem. Also interessting that no other vendor besides
WD found this feature to be necessary. Maybe WD drives have
unreadable sectors more often than other drives?

Arno