9 SATA RAID cards reviewed

[The JoJo]

Here:

http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/1

 

[Mercutio]

Interesting to note the very poor showing by 3ware.
I note that they tested in Windows only. It's not a wholly realistic assumption to make about a given piece of "enterprise" hardware.

Their valuation of promise hardware is in line with what I've seen and heard from others.

And then there's the shocker at the end of the article. Highpoint?!?

 

[Buck]

Nice review. Looking further into Areca, I like their ARC-1210 /1220 /1230 /1260 series SATAII cards.

 

[Corvair]

Looking further into Areca...

Yep, Areca.

They're just one of a number of small aggressive Taiwanese companies that crank out some nifty mainstream products as well as highly useful niche products that the big guyz (like Adaptec) don't want to bother with -- or never even thought of in the first place.

http://www.areca.com.tw/index/html/index.htm



Acard is another such company (I own one of their 2-channel ATA-133 HBAs). Back around 1999, they were the first with those nifty "SCSI Buddies" (SCSI to ATA bridges). They design and manufacturer their own microelectronics and do some OEM work for others:

http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb01.jsp

 

[Buck]

Also at:

[url]http://www.areca.us/[/url]

 

[ddrueding]

After reading that entire artile yesterday, I came to the conclusion that I really need Areca's 20-port PCI-E RAID adapter for a 6TB+ iSCSI NAS I'm quoting

But availability is quite scarce, even a price is hard to find...

 

[Gilbo]

ddrueding, you might be interested in the this thread over at SR. It has some information regarding the availability of Areca's controllers.

 

[P5-133XL]

Really an execelent review. It's been a long time since I've seen one done that well: Willing to show warts and all. I wish more reviews were like that.

 

[Mercutio]

I have many positive things to say about those little Acard ATA to SCSI converters.
But I don't like how much they cost. If they were $30 instead of $60, I would have them on all my PCs.

 

[GIANT]

...I really need Areca's 20-port PCI-E RAID adapter for a 6TB+ iSCSI NAS I'm quoting...

It isn't mentioned very often, but be aware of the 2 TB SCSI limitation. This applies even if you are using SATA or PATA drives because RAID host bus adapters and their drivers commonly emulate SCSI host bus adapters.

The 2 TB limitation also means that the total number of partitions on a physical array can't add up to be larger than 2 TB. Even though modern file systems can handle multiple PetaBytes or ExaBytes, the SCSI command set is deficient.

To tackle this deficiency, a new 16-byte SCSI command set has begun being implemented. LSI Logic recently released new SCSI and FibreChannel silicon (and drivers) for host bus adapters that support the 16-bit SCSI read / write / seek commands.

There should now be a new round of PCI-X and PCI Express RAID host bus adapters with 16-bit SCSI command support -- especially for hosting large numbers of 300 GB SAS hard drives as one array. SCSI (and F-C) hard drives likely won't have native 16-bit command support for a quite a while, since SCSI hard drives would need to have a storage capacity of 2 TB or larger to require such.

 

[Buck]

...be aware of the 2 TB SCSI limitation.

Good point.

Why Areca for your RAID Solutions

Areca's Controllers deliver extreme performance RAID 6 functions, firmware-embedded web browser-based RAID managers, SNMP, and SNMP agents via LAN port, with no software required. They also support greater than 2TB per volume set and Battery Backup Modules (BBM). Areca has completely committed its highly skilled research and development effort to disk array technologies that yield the fastest performance, best reliability, and lower cost points than competitive disk array solutions.

 

[ddrueding]

Yep, the 24-port version would let me use 300GB drives to get a 6.7TB array in RAID-6.

 

[ddrueding]

Any estimate on pricing?