Can I use an Areca ARA-1170 24 port RAID card with 24 HDs in passthrough?

[pclausen]

I recently moved my media server into a new SuperMicro chassis with 24 hot-swap bays and redundant 900W power supplies.  I'm currently using 8 320GB 7200.10 drives in a RAID6 config.  I had plans to begin building a new RAID6 using 1TB 7200.11 (consumer) or ES.2 (enterprise) drives and slowly work my way up to a 21TB array (21 data disks, 2 stripe disks and a hot spare).  But with that many drives in a single array, my chances of having a catastrophic failure during a rebuild would be rather high, even when using enterprise level drives with a 1x10^15 error rate.

 

Since my Areca controller supports pass through (meaning that if I hang 24 drives off the controller, each one can be seem by the OS as an individual drive), I was wondering if I could run unRAID on this setup?

 

Hardware specs as follows:

 

Asus P5WDG2-WS Mobo

Intel D805 CPU

2 512MB sticks of PC-6400 RAM

Areca ARA-1170 PCI-X controller

 

The mobo features dual Marvell Yukon GigE interfaces, which I understand are supported.

 

I'm currently running XP Pro 64-bit w/ LBA support turned on so that I can have larger than 2TB arrays.  XP is booting off a seperate 70GB Raptor at the moment.

 

Here's a couple of pictures of this monster:

 

 

[WeeboTech]

I think the current limitation is 16 drives for unraid.

 

BTW, That's a sweet server!

[cool_runner]

If you are good with linux, you may want to check out ZFS. It offers RAIDZ and RAIDZ2, which are RAID5 and RAID6 but with more features. I was considering it for my server build, but I was really worried that it would just take too much time to get it up and running.