My final question, if you can answer this, is: does the TLER issue lessen/become moot if the RAID is actually
a “software”
RAID? I’ve read some posts that TLER on Green drives becomes an issue when the RAID controller drops the drive and
that software RAID does not do this. Is this true?
Certainly, the greenies should not be used in hardware raid or in fakeraids (at least in my opinion).
Regarding software, i se no problem with software raid (aka, some form of volume manager, mdadm, lvm, VxVM).
The point is that fakeraids are mixed beasts because it is the bios which first handles the disks/raid (and tries to behave like a hardware raid, but uses the CPU & RAM for computations). Then the operating system (mostly Win) loads a software driver and it is that software that ‘continues’ handling the driver. Both component, the Fakeraid_BIOS and the OS_Fakeraid_Driver are able to understand the specific controller metadata. But this scheme is much less flexible than software raid. If you use windows and cannot afford a good HBA (lsi, adaptec, etc with it’s own CPU+RAM and even cache battery) and enterprise disks (not just TLER but other features) your only option for using raid with the C: drive are fakeraids.(sis / nvidia / intel, etc, etc. and even for different motherboard vendors/model)
I do not have any issue with software raid (mdadm/linux), with blacks, greens. And i know of some greens with more than a year and a half uptime in ‘perfect health’ wirth mdadm/linux. (i got surprised when i looked they smarctl data)
I feel that the TLER is being abused by the marketing people. There is a lot of confused people. The people that do not know, keep not knowing/caring. The people who know, well just knows. And te people that is learning, and posseses certain level of knowledgebut does not master a field (example, storage knowledge) are being forced to learn in the hard way. (for example, using 2 blacks for fakeraid on a supported controller with supported drives and supported usage by wd and finding that it does not work.)
I your case:
* update to tha latest BIOS/UEFI + Fakeraid Card Firmware
* update the operating system drivers (all, video, chipset, etc, ALL)
Try again, if fails:
* jumper all drives to a lower sata link speed.
* also, since you have 4 drives (or more?), i think you should use the “power on in standby” feature. Your controller seems to support “Staggered Drive Spinup”.
