(Thor Lancelot Simon) wrote in message ...
Can someone tell me what this buzzword^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeature of the
Western Digital "RAID Edition" disk drives actually is?

"Traditional" drive firmware can take very long when reading a bad
block before they report that the block was unreadable (time spent
doing retries, recalibrations, etc.). When you
don't have RAID, this is probably the right thing. But when you have
RAID, it's almost always better to quickly mark the block as failed
and use the RAID redundancy to get to the real data.

There's some kind of out-of-band handshake between the RAID controller
and the drive that enables this. With SCSI drives it's mode page settings,
with IDE drives I don't know the details.

SCSI drives intended for RAID applications had spindle sync signals, maybe
"RAID Edition" IDE drives can do this through some channel?

Tim.