Green/blue/black drives

[snedker]

Hi

How come WD uses green drives fore their My Book series (raid) when WD says it wont work as raid discs etc. Qnap???

[jonj678]

Of course the green drives work in raid. Any drives work in raid.

Not recommended is different to not working, I imagine WD recommend against raid because many (most?) people who set up raid with consumer drives aren't absolutely sure what they're doing. It would be very easy to have a badly thought through raid set up declare all the drives involved to be faulty, followed by the customer rma'ing them, when the drives are in fact fine. Which would wear thin for the technicians and the accountants.

Alternatively it's a warning not to use their consumer drives in a server.

[fzabkar]

snedker, that's a very good question. AIUI, WD disables TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) in their consumer grade drives but enables it in their enterprise models. Without TLER, a drive that has difficulty reading a bad sector may cause the RAID controller to timeout. Perhaps the RAID controllers in the My Books have a more generous timeout interval, or perhaps they don't timeout at all???