Areca
- Thread starter Bozo
- Start date
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
No first-hand experience, but it must be noisy as Hell with that little fan on it. From what I read on the Net, Areca makes above-average products. Except for the noise, you shouln't be disappointed with the performances.
I don't have any first-hand experience either. What about this adapter is drawing your interest vs the others available on the market? Also, what's the Ethernet port out the back for? Is it an actual NIC? What about a Dell Perc H700 (16 drives) or Dell Perc H800 (192 drives) with 512MB NV RAM?
ddrueding
Fixture
I've had 3 3Ware RAID cards and one Areca over the years. The Areca kept balking at drives. Sure they weren't on the HCL, but 3Ware never had that issue.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
It's the only low profile, 12 disc RAID card I found. I wanted to install it in a 2U rack mount.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Do you really need the 12 drives to be in RAID or do you already own the motherboard? If not, you could save a bunch by opting for a motherboard that already has 12 or more SATA ports onboard. That's 600$ cheaper.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
An SAS expander would fix that problem as well.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
It's a managed device - that's the management port, where you ideally have a separate network for management.
Ddrueding said:
That would be the notorious WD (or possibly Seagate?) 3Gbps SATA drives that failed to work reliably with enterprise-class controllers?
Areca gained fame some years back as being the first to offer RAID 10 write performance in a RAID 5 configuration. They are a premium brand.
Fastmail has sworn by them for years - the managed aspect is probably just as important to them as the high performance.
There's a review here that tests a variant of Bozo's model with 8x OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE (RAID Enhanced) 40GB SSDs.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
I need 2 file servers with ~18TB of space each in RAID 5. I will need an 'archieve' enclosure with 18TB in RAID 5. Once the 'archieve' enclosure is full, it will be removed from the rack and stored in a vault. A new 'archieve' enclosure will take it's place.
The file servers will hold about a years worth of data. When they get full, the oldest month will be deleted, every month. One of the servers is the feed to the 'archieve' enclosure.
Because of the cost, I am consdering 2TB drives, although the Hitachi 3TB look to be reasonable.
ddrueding
Fixture
Yup. Both as a matter of fact. But all those drives worked fine in 3Ware, Adaptec, and other controllers. Fair enough they weren't in the HCL, but I would argue 3Ware is up there in the RAID card hierarchy as well and works just fine.