If a HHD has TLER does that make it unusable as a stand alone drive?

Looking for the best WD HDD to use in a single HDD external firewire enclosure as a time machine back-up for my iMac. I want the best that I can buy and was looking at the RE & RED line but from what I read any of the WD HDD’s with TLER are not recommended for stand alone use. I did read in this post that there are tools to disable TLER but I haven’t been able to find anything else about what tools or how to get them. 

Just wanted to know if that is the case or is there an exception to this rule. And if so am I left with buying a WD Black HDD since it is the top tier of Desktop drives?

Any thoughts on this are appreciated!

Hello there,

From my experience i have a RE drive as a secondary drive on one of my computers and have not experienced any issue. You can use this drives with no problems i know that this drives have tler but this not affect the way they work as a stand alone drive. 

If I had not confused myself (and without searching on the web), TLER is meant for error recovery, and stands for Time-Limited Error Recovery. When your drive has TLER, it limits the amount of time for error recovery done by the hard disk itself.

This feature is generally needed for RAIDs, so that we can leave it to RAID to perform the error recovery. If the hard disk’s error recovery is taking too long, it could somehow fail the RAID module’s error recovery, or something like that.

So my guess is, if you’re using it as a standalone drive, if there’s any failing sector, TLER will limit your hard disk’s time spent in trying to recover it. If this is not an issue for you, then you should be able to use it as a standalone drive.