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TLER / CCTL support on 82801 GR/GH (IHC7 family) SATA RAID controller

idata
Employee
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I am replacing 2 drives on my Dell Precision 390 which has Intel Storage Matrix Manager 82801 GR/GH (IHC7 family) SATA RAID controller. Machine is in RAID 1 configuration. I've been reading about drives - consumer versus enterprise - and all the enterprise drives I am coming across have either TLER or CCTL enabled. Just wondering if the 82801 GR/GH (IHC7 family) SATA RAID controller works with Western Digital RE3 TLER-enabled drives? The current drives are Samsung and do not have CCTL capabilities. Thanks.

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HERBERT_H_Intel
Employee
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i don't think you need any special TLER-aware raid controller to make use of TLER. from what i've seen it just serves as a function to limit the amount of time the HDD will try to do an error recovery.

I guess the real important question would be what is the default timeout on an ICH7 family controller before it droppes the drive out of the RAID. I found that the default time for a WD TLER to function is 7 seconds.

Seeing as the WD RE2 edition drive is supported on the http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/hdd_test_report_rev_23_0.pdf# page=19 S3000SH entry server board which has an ICH7 and these drives have TLER enabled by default i'd say that it should work with the ICH7 generally.

OJ

idata
Employee
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Perhaps my original question should have been more along the lines of - TLER drives try to recover from an error for about 7 seconds versus non-TLER drives which try for 10, 15, 30 seconds, perhaps. So how TLER vs non-TLER drives interact with IHC7? That is, am i more likely to get unrecoverable errors with a TLER drive because the IHC7 is not trying to fix the error in the background? If the IHC7 is more "hands-off", then I may be better off going with a non-TLER drive to allow the drive more time to recover. That said regarding recovery time, will the IHC7 drop my drive from the array that has the error problem? How long does the IHC7 wait (seconds) before dropping the drive?

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HERBERT_H_Intel
Employee
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honestly i have no idea how long it would take for the ich7 do drop out a drive. but the way i see it having TLER would give you 2 data recovery attempts compared to not having TLER which the drive would try to recover longer than it should. lets face it, if an error doesn't get recovered in 7 seconds it probably won't be and its better to leave the RAID controller to do the recovery from the other redundant drive.

OJ

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idata
Employee
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oj says "honestly i have no idea how long it would take for the ich7 do drop out a drive"

Intel, can you tell us how long it would take for the ihc7 to drop a drive if one were trying to do error recovery for an extended time?

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idata
Employee
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It's 10 seconds. (eta to add that it will wait 10 sec for the drive to reply)

I only know what I've read about TLER and similar features, but it does sound like the feature will lessen the chance for hard drives to be dropped from a RAID array - because the drive is more likely to respond before the time-out period is reached.

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CJuds
Beginner
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Can it be confirmed that the 10 second timeout apllies against all Intel Matrix Storage/Rapid Storage Controllers and not just the ICH7 family? Is this timeout a function of the driver and not the controller and if so can it be changed to a different value? Since Seagate Enterprise drives have a 10 second ERC, it seems like a Seagate drive might not respond before the controller has timed out.

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