Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I am a Linux user who had been running software mirroring with a couple Western Digital 1TB Black Edition drives and had been having frequent problems with drives dropping out of the RAID when using the SATA ports built into my motherboard. I've read some reviews about Areca a couple of years ago and finally decided to bite the bullet since this card was within my budget.
I installed the RAID controller and hooked up a couple of spare WD 1TB drives I had. At first I could not get into the BIOS to configure the RAID controller, but I was able to use the CLI tool on my 64-bit OpenSUSE 11.3 install. After creating a couple of volumes I went into Linux and partitioned them. I then started restoring everything onto a mirrored array after formatting my main partition as XFS. The first thing I noticed was how much faster it was than software RAID. I was quite pleased.
I then decided I might as well migrate to RAID 5 and so I added the other two drives to the array, setting one up as a spare. It took forever, but the card seamlessly converted everything to RAID 5 and I extended my main RAID volume. I then went to grow my filesystem and realized my mistake with using the Linux LVM on top of it. LVM would not grow the volume (not Areca's fault) so I went back and partitioned it without LVM and restored my data from backup. If I hadn't of used LVM this would have been painless. I also tuned the XFS filesystem to the RAID stripe size and number of drives to further improve performance.
I later went and bought the battery option so I could use the write-back cache reliably and it screams.
The documentation could be a lot better and there are times where it's apparent it was translated to English. This is also apparent when using the web interface, which was easy to set up.
The CLI does crash when I try and look at the SMART results, though the web server has no problem (apparently the latest update fixes this). I contacted Areca a couple of times and they have always been helpful and responsive.
My other choice would have been 3Ware, but I bought an IDE RAID card from them years ago and had a lot of problems with it (though new versions are supposedly a lot better).
Linux had no problems seeing the card since the drivers are open source and included with the kernel distribution.
It would be nice if the card could display additional SMART information like I got from smartmon tools as well as having the web interface be able to display some statistics.
Some people have complained that the fan is loud on this card. I have no complaints as it seems rather quiet. Included is an alternate heatsink without a fan which I did not install.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Areca ARC-1210 - Storage controller (RAID) - 4 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, JBOD - PCI Express x8
The ARC-12XX SATA ll RAID host adapter is a high-performance PCI-Express bus to SATA ll Disk Array host adapter. The controller can provide up to 4 8 12 or 16 SATA ll peripheral devices on a single host adapter. When properly configured the SATA host adapter can provide non-stop service with a high degree of fault tolerance through the use of RAID technology and advanced array management features. Intel IOP333 processor has integrated the RAID 6 engine inside. It offers Areca the advantage of reduced engineering and development costs by having the New RAID6 function build-in and integrated part saves on component costs and internal PCI bandwidth. Intel emphasis on architectural commonality in IOPs allows Areca developers to capitalize on their existing code base. Primary InformationDevice Type:Storage controller (RAID)Form Factor:Plug-in cardInterface Type:PCI-Express x 8Max Storage Devices Qty:4Controller Interface Type:Serial ATA IICache Buffer Size:128 MBFeatures:Chipset: Intel 80332 I/O Processor ; Cache Memory: 128MB on-board DDR333 SDRAM with ECC protectionDimensions&MiscellaneousDepth:2.5 InchHeight:6.6 InchHeader / Model:ARC-1210ExpansionInterfaces & Connections:Internal Connectors: 4x Serial ATA II (2 multi-layer SATA latch connectors)SoftwareSystem Requirements / OS Required:Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 Redhat Linux SuSE Linux FreeBSDUNSPSC CodeUNSPSC Code:43201500
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