(Solved) Areca Controller Hardware support question


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Hi,

I have two servers that currently have 1 ARC-1882IX-24 controller in each 4U server. Will the controllers work in unRAID. I am currently in testing mode on an older Supermicro Xeon 771 server that I had laying around and am finding some controllers do not work. I really cant take my two data centers off line to test the Areca controllers but I really want to leave the Windows server enviroment.

 

Both have V1.52 2014-02-07 installed and both are the 4GB ETC models.

 

Any info would be great on these cards. 

Ross

 

 

Edited by rosswaters
Posted on phone with spelling errors
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  • 8 months later...

Update, after a few servers that used the ARC-1882IX-12 controllers were taken off line I found that they do in fact work for anyone with the same question.

I have yet tested the 24 port cards but it uses the exact driver so I would say yes to that too.

You can create pass-through disks and RAID 1-60 arrays and they work. The only issue I found to date is any pass-though disks created will be impossible to delete from the web interface while the server array is online, even if the drive is unassigned. The Areca web interface stated that the drive is in use by the attached system and can't be deleted. Taking array off-line allows pass-through deletion.

I now have one of my unRAID servers running one of the 4, 12 port cards I have with plans to add more.

I personally run ESX and when vCenter initiates a backup of the VMs I was finding that it was taking an hour to backup my domain controllers alone with the 4TB SAS drive I was using as a cache drive in unRAID. I now have a RAID5 with 4, 1TB SSD drives and I get over 2000MBs until the 4GB ECC memory is full (in my case it takes about 20 seconds at 40G  using an Intel XL710-BM2 on both ends) then it drops to 1500MBs ish for the remaining data. The transfers from vCenter now only take a few minutes to perform. I have also decided I am now going to step away from the Windows server environment. I feel this is a good option for me. With super fast cache that can be obtained with hard drives, it make unRAID a viable choice for me since I already own 4, 12 port and 2, 24 port controllers.

I still use LSI HBA cards for the rest of the array as they pass information from the drive that is useful to unRAID. For the cache unRAID only sees one drive even though you might have 8 drives making that one drive with redundancy. I am also thinking about making a test server using RAID for both the Cache and the Parity drive to see if I can further boost the performance. I am hoping that the RAID on both the  Cache and Parity is enough to allow the server to keep up when all drives are being written to by the users it is supporting.

Areca cards pass the temperature of the drives but SMART and other errors have to be set up in the controller using an SMTP server that will pass an email of any events the drives have. They also support SNMP for those with monitoring software for their network devices. This also will increase costs on power usage for home users that try this but I am sure this is minimal when you already have 24-36 drives in the server. I know that 2 exact models with basically the same setup minus the LSI HBAs in unRAID have different power usage over the course of a one month period. The unRAID is about 17% less to operate. I believe this is due to the drives powering down when not in use. The Windows servers use more power cause the drives are on all the time due to the increased time it takes to spin up a 16 disk array. 

unRAID is set to 1 hour before idle
Windows is set to 17 hours

Performance match, unRAID wins big time using this configuration in both speed and power usage.

I am hoping I can do the same big win when I configure the Parity drive to a RAID array. 

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