Are you thinking of buying WD Scorpio Blue for your RAID?

STOP!

If you are thinking of putting any WD Scorpio Blue into a RAID array, stop, do not do it. WD Scorpio Blue hard drives do not function in RAID arrays.
I learned this the hard way after buying two (2) 640GB Scorpio Blue hard drives. After a week or so, one or both of the HDs show deterioration or total malfunction on the array.

Per WD:
"Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is Pablo R.

I apologize for the inconvenience. The wd6400bevt is a WD Scorpio Blue, this is not a RAID edition drive. Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically as a stand-alone drive, or in a multi-drive RAID environment.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

Note: There are a few cases where the manufacturer of the RAID controller have designed their drives to work with specific model Desktop drives. If this is the case you would need to contact the manufacturer of that enclosure for any support on that drive while it is used in a RAID environment.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. While TLER is designed for RAID environments, a drive with TLER enabled will work with no performance decrease when used in non-RAID environments.

For information on our RAID edition drives, please visit the link below:

Enterprise Drives Overview

I hope that we have met your expectations today and that you are satisfied with our service. If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

Sincerely,
Pablo R
Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com"
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As you will all notice, I did not know that WD made a specific RAID edition hard drive. Any and all Seagate hard drives work fine in RAID arrays. So, spend a bit more and buy Seagate. Know I know why my original Clevo came with Seagate hard drives!

You've been warned.

 

Interesting. I never knew this. Good to know. I almost used two of their Scorpio black drives in a RAID 0 array on one of my laptops. Sounds like that would have been a colossal mistake.

 

Yes, WD likes to hide behind their FAQs to find out that they make different hard drives. You will never see in WDs technical info that the Scorpios are not for RAID systems. Weird, but true.
The WD 640GB HDs are failing on my 9280. On the other computer, a 9262, I have one 320GB Seagate Momentus ST9320421AS 7200RPM, and one 200GB Toshiba MK2049GSY 7200RPM. As you will notice, on my 9262, different makes, different capacity, NO PROBLEM on a RAID 1...!!!

 

Update:
One day before my two new 640GB Seagate Momentus hard drives arrived, both of the Western Digital 640GB Scorpio Blue HDs failed. Couldn't even go into the OS, taking one out, or switching between one and the other (remember that I have both on RAID-1, mirror copies) would get my laptop up and running.
Once I got the Seagates, I started a fresh installation.

Damn you WD. It's not the money for the hard drives that me off. It's the time taken to scour endless websites to find out that WD makes a cheap, useless on RAID, hard drive. WD does not even mention this on their Scorpio FAQs, or tech pages.
Maybe it's just me, but if someone makes a hard drive that does not work on RAID, maybe, just maybe, a simple three word sentence would suffice. "NOT FOR RAID."
Am I asking too much? Let me know.

Regards, and happy computing...

 

I never knew it had to do with the hard drive as it did with the RAID controller. That seems odd. Hell probably five or six years ago I raided two Maxtors (piece of crap that they were) and worked fine.

Something smells fishy.