Offered on Barracuda ES and ES.2 family SATA enterprise drives, Error Recovery Control (ERC) is a subset of the Smart Command Transport (SCT) command set, enabling the host to set a soft time limit for specific commands (reads and writes).

Advantages:

• Ensures hosts don't mistakenly assume busy drives are dead and need maintenance; averts unwarranted drive swaps and RAID rebuilds
• Boosts RAID performance by flagging disks slowed by errors; alerts need for data reconstruction and rewrite to resolve disk errors, restore speed
• Unavailable in desktop-class drives (due to less demanding environment)

Key Component:  Soft Time Limit