RE4 drives and risk of data loss for single drive

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I purchased 2 RE4 drives (WD5003ABYX) for backup drives but didn’t realize that they weren’t intended to be used as single drives. As a single drive, they’re supposedly more likely to lose data if there is an error because the drive uses TLER.

What is the risk?

Will there be just a few lost files or will there be a total loss of data on the drive?

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi there, as long as the drive itself is taken care of and you’re monitoring its performance (degradation, bad sectors, temperature) then it should not matter until it dies.

3

You could use WD’s WDTLER utility to disable the read and write timeouts.

Here is the command help:

WDTLER Version 1.03
Copyright (C) 2004-2006 Western Digital Corporation
Western Digital Time Limit Error Recovery Utility
Using DT32.LIB version 08A

Syntax:
WDTLER [-R] [-W] [-?]
Parameters:
-R Set read TLER seconds. Use 0 to disable.
-W Set write TLER seconds. Use 0 to disable.

/? This help screen.