Question on ARC-1231ML and expanding volumes

[vxspiritxv]

I have never done raid outside of an onboard 2drive raid0 setup, but am looking to build a large media center / server. Looks to be the best PCIe card I can find in my budget range that will do the speed I want (I want to max out gigabit with room to say rip a dvd/hddvd at same time).

Anyways now for my question, how does the performance on a raid5 array do when the drives (same model name, but different serials, which some times means different everything) change slightly... IE I buy 3 seagate 750 drives now and like 3 more 5 months from now when I need more space.

I'm also assuming, the live expansion means, I add the drives, wait a few hour, then I use PQmagic and expand the volume, or just create another partition.

[unhappy_mage]

I have never done raid outside of an onboard 2drive raid0 setup, but am looking to build a large media center / server. Looks to be the best PCIe card I can find in my budget range that will do the speed I want (I want to max out gigabit with room to say rip a dvd/hddvd at same time).
Just so you know, HD is nothing like gigabit. You can play Blu-Ray over 100 megabits with room for HD-DVD. But if you want to max out gigabit, it's your money ;)
Anyways now for my question, how does the performance on a raid5 array do when the drives (same model name, but different serials, which some times means different everything) change slightly... IE I buy 3 seagate 750 drives now and like 3 more 5 months from now when I need more space.
Generally there's no problem. Only in rare cases is something so different about the firmwares that it causes huge speed drops. Usually having more disks counterbalances it.
I'm also assuming, the live expansion means, I add the drives, wait a few hour, then I use PQmagic and expand the volume, or just create another partition.
Yes. Although "back up all my data" should definitely be on that list; while it's generally a safe operation, if you were to lose power in the middle of it you'd lose the whole array.

[pissboy]

Yes. Although "back up all my data" should definitely be on that list; while it's generally a safe operation, if you were to lose power in the middle of it you'd lose the whole array.

The Areca cards can be interupted in the middle of a RAID build/expansion/change/etc and start where they left off on the next boot.

[unhappy_mage]

The Areca cards can be interupted in the middle of a RAID build/expansion/change/etc and start where they left off on the next boot.

I realize that. But it's something I'd rather not rely on. Having a fallback plan is a better idea than having a complainfest with tech support ;)

[unixadm]

I have the ARC-1231ML. A few words of advice on this card.

1. Make sure you have GOOD cooling.
2. The cables that come with it are somewhat short and may not reach in larger cases that can support 6-12 drives.
3. I have personally expanded my array from four 750gb Seagate drives to six 750gb Seagate drives. I have two more 750gb Seagate drives sitting on my desk to expand to eight drives. I'm installing everything in new Super Micro 5x3 hot swap bays.
4. Performance of this card is pretty good, but I often get pauses and such under both Vista X64 and XP64 at random times during disk read/writes. More so when I'm watching or recording TV.
5. Plan on adding a 1gb stick of DDR2 533mhz memory for cache to the card. It helps during write operations. I used Kingston KVR533D2E4/1GI from Newegg, and it was under $50 at the time.
6. Plan on adding the cache battery for about $125 shipped.
7. Gigabit Ethernet has a maximum transfer of 100MB/Sec - figure if you're getting 80% of that due to overhead, you're doing pretty darn good. The more spindles (disks) the better the read performance, but with four disks you should not have a problem with throughput.
8. The rebuild/expansion processes are SLOW. The more space, the slower it goes.