ARECA Owner's Thread (SAS/SATA RAID Cards)

With my drives spun down and the card doing nothing I'm seeing:
CPU Temperature 94 ºC
Controller Temp. 47 ºC
CPU Fan 3350 RPM

Something looks to be terribly wrong here. I use msi afterburner to monitor gpu temps which are low 60s which is great. Core temp shows CPU is also at low 60s. CPUID hardware monitor shows motherboard temps between 46-64 but there is one temp showing 109 which I think is just a faulty indicator based on the program and my particular board (it does change so it is reading something). The drives are about 40 in the mgmt console and when all accessed for hours during parity creation the hottest ones might hit 50 but nothing more. The case isn't that hot. How in the world is this card at 94 or could it be reporting wrong? (all temps in C)

Interestingly I see no events in the log for over temp and no beeps either. That option is on in the mgmt console.

What are the peak temps for both? Anyone have any ideas on this?
 
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With my drives spun down and the card doing nothing I'm seeing:
CPU Temperature 94 ºC
Controller Temp. 47 ºC
CPU Fan 3350 RPM

Something looks to be terribly wrong here. I use msi afterburner to monitor gpu temps which are low 60s which is great. Core temp shows CPU is also at low 60s. CPUID hardware monitor shows motherboard temps between 46-64 but there is one temp showing 109 which I think is just a faulty indicator based on the program and my particular board (it does change so it is reading something). The drives are about 40 in the mgmt console and when all accessed for hours during parity creation the hottest ones might hit 50 but nothing more. The case isn't that hot. How in the world is this card at 94 or could it be reporting wrong? (all temps in C)

Interestingly I see no events in the log for over temp and no beeps either. That option is on in the mgmt console.

What are the peak temps for both? Anyone have any ideas on this?

I have never seen an areca card hit those CPU temps. I would expect there is something wrong with the card (which could be a thermistor, or something on the CPU is bad and it is doing calcs 24/7 or something happened to the heat sink paste). You are getting these temps through the management console and not some other app, correct? This being the case, and with the other temps in your case within normal margins I would RMA the card.
 
Correct I am getting those temps through the mgmt console. The thing that really beats me is that the heat sink isn't hot and looks like it is connected just fine.
 
I took the heat sink off the card to see what's going on. I don't think it makes proper contact. Besides that there are silicone looking waffers to transfer heat to the heat sink and those may well be ineffective and improper size. I took the one off the cpu side and put some arctic silver down and then put the heat sink back on. Made sure it was making contact properly. After 20 min file transfer the temps have stabilized at CPU-77 Controller 46. Still not great but a whole lot better. Anyone else had to tweak their heat sink? What's the word on these silicon wafer looking things? I'd take them all off and use arctic silver but there are some onboard modules that they touch besides the cpu and controller. Also I think the spring tension on the heat sink is too light. Areca just can't seem to get the cooling right on these things. First it was the crappy fans on the old ones. Now they cant set a heat sink and have a rather ineffective one.
 
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I took the heat sink off the card to see what's going on. I don't think it makes proper contact. Besides that there are silicone looking waffers to transfer heat to the heat sink and those may well be ineffective and improper size. I took the one off the cpu side and put some arctic silver down and then put the heat sink back on. Made sure it was making contact properly. After 20 min file transfer the temps have stabilized at CPU-77 Controller 46. Still not great but a whole lot better. Anyone else had to tweak their heat sink? What's the word on these silicon wafer looking things? I'd take them all off and use arctic silver but there are some onboard modules that they touch besides the cpu and controller. Also I think the spring tension on the heat sink is too light. Areca just can't seem to get the cooling right on these things. First it was the crappy fans on the old ones. Now they cant set a heat sink and have a rather ineffective one.

Like I said, you might have a bad card. That doesn't make Areca "not getting cooling right". In any case, just remember if you choose to RMA the card they may be within their rights to kick it back as modified since you changed the heat sink paste.
 
TivoMad-
When the problem started, was it an entire row of drives (bunches of 4) that started going off in unison? Norcos have had some flakey backplanes over the years. It is possible that the controller has just gone tits up. Do you have a note of the config settings of each of the arrays (which drive belonged to which array, their order in the arrays, the stripe size you used to create the array, etc?) With the proper info (You MUST have the proper raidset/volumeset info or bad things will happen!), you will be able to recreate your arrays with the Rescue, signat and NoInit option. Before you do anything, can you post some screenshots of your areca config screens as well as all your logs so we have a better idea of exactly what happened before we start with how to fix things. As far as boards. yes you can substitute the 1882 for the 1880 to import the raidsets. The obvious next question is do you have a current backup of these arrays? What firmware rev is your 1880 at now?

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and my apologies for not getting back sooner. I've been pretty busy setting up a temporary server with our most critical data. When the problem started, the disks were going offline in a completely random fashion across all the backplanes. I have backups in various forms for all the data - only a couple of TB was critical. Yes, I do have all the RAID setup info. but thankfully this time, I don't need it.

I managed to source an 1882 for a really good price and it came today. As you said, it just dropped in and all the data was fine. From what I can see, the on board SAS expander died the death of a thousand nomads - a slow painful one. I received an RMA number and the 1880 is now en-route to Taiwan for analysis.

It's great that the new controller just picked up the config. and all was good although I used to write drivers and firmware for RAID cards so I know it's actually not THAT hard to do (but it's still cool when you see it in action).

Anyways, all good and soon, I will have a spare controller in case this happens again.

Thanks & Kind Regards,
TiVo AKA Trevor.
 
Tivo-
Glad to hear it all worked out. Areca are very good for accepting arrays card to card, I have had migration success more with Areca than LSI or 3Ware over the years, which is why we use them exclusively when we can use 3rd party controllers. As I mentioned above, it is always a good idea to keep a sketch of your array setups, drive orders, stripe and block size etc in case you ever need to use any of the more advanced reconstruction tools Areca offers in case of a problem where you can't just plug and play a new controller.
 
A while ago people said the Hitachi disks was better with Areca, how is it nowdays... Areca + ST3000DM001

Those seagate drives are almost 30% cheaper that hitachi 3TB
 
A while ago people said the Hitachi disks was better with Areca, how is it nowdays... Areca + ST3000DM001

Those seagate drives are almost 30% cheaper that hitachi 3TB

Probably a 1 year warranty too. :mad:
 
A while ago people said the Hitachi disks was better with Areca, how is it nowdays... Areca + ST3000DM001

Those seagate drives are almost 30% cheaper that hitachi 3TB

"Hitachi disks better with Areca" is an incorrect/vague statement and could be interpreted by some as Areca needing specific drives. Hitachi is/was simply better than anything else in the consumer desktop drive class with hardware raid cards in general.

The 3TB Seagates are also fine -- pretty much anything is fine with an Areca, especially with the new 1.50+ firmware it is the most tolerant and accomodating RAID card I've tested, since its also got drive-specific features and TLER settings.

I wouldn't run anything less than RAID6 with Seagate however.
 
"Hitachi disks better with Areca" is an incorrect/vague statement and could be interpreted by some as Areca needing specific drives. Hitachi is/was simply better than anything else in the consumer desktop drive class with hardware raid cards in general.

The 3TB Seagates are also fine -- pretty much anything is fine with an Areca, especially with the new 1.50+ firmware it is the most tolerant and accomodating RAID card I've tested, since its also got drive-specific features and TLER settings.

I wouldn't run anything less than RAID6 with Seagate however.

odditory-
We have started looking at the 3 platter/3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 as a cheap backup/replacement for the 5ks. Things have been generally positive except for some "pausing" of transfers coming off the array. The Areca log doesn't show anything, no drivers drop or error out there is just a 10 second pause. I pulled some of the drives off and connected them to a serial/ttl adapter so I could dump the two hour health logs from the drive itself, and also the G/P & Critical logs. The drives seem to be going busy for 10,000ms at random times. TRecal is off and they are well vented. I also tried manually setting continue on error on the drive itself but that didn't make any difference. I have tried it on 1880 and 1882 cards, the 1880 seems to be worse so I wonder if it is an areca issue. We also heard from one of our reps that Toshiba is talking about really ramping up their 3.5" retail/oem drive selection with the production capacity they get from WDC re: the HGST acquisition. Supposed to be 5 year warranties and 10^16 UREs and cheaper than their current enterprise stuff. No time frame was given though.

One thing I just saw, don't know if it is a price error or if they won't honor the price when it comes back in stock... Newegg has a 20 pack of 2TB SAS drives for under a grand at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149342
 
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Hi everyone!, I do not speak English very well sorry I'm helped by google ... I have some questions: I have a 1880ix-16 with firmware 1.5. I connected 12 Seagate 7500.11 1.5TB (4 aditional will come Monday)

1) I was surprised to see that the maximum stripe size that I could choose was 128kb! But the card should support 1mb? I read that Areca had disabled the stripe of 256 and more for hard drives that do not support the standard LBA48 (disk larger than 128gb??) ... 1500gb should be supported?

2) I did a test and initialization of a RAID 6 is very long, after 12 hours I was at 50% ... Is this normal?

Thank's for your help
Paul Bernard
 
I've not seen any larger stripe sizes past 128kb. Doubt it will really make much of a difference in terms of performance, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. As for it taking 12 hours, that's also normal. Be glad you don't have an older card; those took considerably longer.
 
I don't have an 1880 with unassigned drives currently available to test, but as per the manual it supports stripe sizes up to 1M. That said, unless you are strictly working with exceptionally large files as a rule and need to move them everytime at maximum speed, you will generally be happier with a smaller stripe size and will not see any difference in the grand scheme of things. It will also minimize wasted stripe space if you have lots of smaller files. Also keep in mind (if you are running windows) that you shouldn't change the cluster size from 512 to 4k, as you will then have a maximum volume size limitation of 16TB. As to why they may have disabled the option in the latest bios I don't know if they did it for a reason. As to LBA48, that is a filesystem limitation and not a hardware issue in a current drive.

As to the init time, did you do a foreground init while in the BIOS, or did you do a background init? If background, did you set the background tast priority to 80% from I believe 20% which is default (In System Controls in the BIOS). As to what to generally expect with times, I just setup a 12 drive 36TB RAID6 with an 1882 connected to a HP expander and using 5K3000 drives. It took 30 hours to complete the init with background set to 80%, so 12 hours for 50% of 18GB isn't that off especially if you are at lower than 80%.
 
Thank's for quick responses! I did a foreground init for 12 x 1.5TB. This is why I found it slow (my LSI 8888 took 4 hours for 8 x 1.5TB) but if it is in standard with Areca ... I will try with the 128kb stripe when I had my 4 other drives. I'll come back with results in a few days!

thank you
 
Thank's for quick responses! I did a foreground init for 12 x 1.5TB. This is why I found it slow (my LSI 8888 took 4 hours for 8 x 1.5TB) but if it is in standard with Areca ... I will try with the 128kb stripe when I had my 4 other drives. I'll come back with results in a few days!

thank you

I have never used the 8888 so I don't know if this applies to that card or not, but some of the MegaRaid SAS cards have an option called "Fast Initialize" which can be set on or off. Fast starts the init for a time and then returns control to you so you can start using the array immediately. It then continues the initialization in the background in more of a rebuild scenario where you still have access to however much has completed while it continues in the background (it will be slower at this point because it is essentially a degraded array rebuilding from a set point. It can usually be toggled on or off, or there will be a choice for Fast Init or Slow Init (which does the complete init in the foreground) if it is supported in your card at all.
 
Have an ARC-1280ML... need some new drives, but unfortunately the Hitachi 5K3000's are out the question... they're either not available or twice as expensive as anything else here in Sweden.

Usage is media storage and RAID-5 or RAID-6.

Have these choices:
WD Caviar Green 2TB - WD20EARX
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB, 5900 RPM - ST2000DL003
Seagate Barracuda 2TB, 7200 RPM - ST2000DM001
EDIT: Maybe Samsung EcoGreen F4 - HD204UI

Or the 3TB versions of those.
I'd rather have the green drives for less heat and lower RPM's... but previously I know there have been issues with Areca and green drives (or basically all drives except old Seagates..)

Does that still apply?

Which of these drives would be recommended?
 
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odditory-
We have started looking at the 3 platter/3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 as a cheap backup/replacement for the 5ks. Things have been generally positive except for some "pausing" of transfers coming off the array. The Areca log doesn't show anything, no drivers drop or error out there is just a 10 second pause. I pulled some of the drives off and connected them to a serial/ttl adapter so I could dump the two hour health logs from the drive itself, and also the G/P & Critical logs. The drives seem to be going busy for 10,000ms at random times. TRecal is off and they are well vented. I also tried manually setting continue on error on the drive itself but that didn't make any difference. I have tried it on 1880 and 1882 cards, the 1880 seems to be worse so I wonder if it is an areca issue. We also heard from one of our reps that Toshiba is talking about really ramping up their 3.5" retail/oem drive selection with the production capacity they get from WDC re: the HGST acquisition. Supposed to be 5 year warranties and 10^16 UREs and cheaper than their current enterprise stuff. No time frame was given though.

One thing I just saw, don't know if it is a price error or if they won't honor the price when it comes back in stock... Newegg has a 20 pack of 2TB SAS drives for under a grand at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1622149342

Yes the 1TB/platter Seagates are what I've been buying as well while waiting for things continue to shake out with HGST/WD and waiting on a spiritual successor to the 5K4000. Have had 8 of the ST3000DM001's in a RAID6 for a few months just to evaluate, no issues but if a clear cut 5K4000 successor does come along they're getting dumped because Seagate continues to be shaky long-term based on the failure rate I see in our data centers. Interesting about Toshiba ramping up 3.5" production, so does that mean Toshiba took over some of Hitachi's fabs? I've heard conflicting stories on who exactly took over those fabs and what they'd be producing going forward, and whether WD or anyone else would continue to produce drives based on Hitachi's former design. But if WD in their probable corporate arrogance really believes their designs & production were superior they're high on a mixture of chemicals and I'll have the privilege of never needing to look at another one of their drives again.
 
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Yes the 1TB/platter Seagates are what I've been buying as well while waiting for things continue to shake out with HGST/WD and waiting on a spiritual successor to the 5K4000. Have had 8 of the ST3000DM001's in a RAID6 for a few months just to evaluate, no issues but if a clear cut 5K4000 successor does come along they're getting dumped because Seagate continues to be shaky long-term based on the failure rate I see in our data centers. Interesting about Toshiba ramping up 3.5" production, so does that mean Toshiba took over some of Hitachi's fabs? I've heard conflicting stories on who exactly took over those fabs and what they'd be producing going forward, and whether WD or anyone else would continue to produce drives based on Hitachi's former design. But if WD in their probable corporate arrogance really believes their designs & production were superior they're high on a mixture of chemicals and I'll have the privilege of never needing to look at another one of their drives again.

Well, we got an answer from Seagate, they got us a engineering firmware which fixed the issues. It only affected a few production lots and Seagate has agreed to replace all our drives with fresh new stock.
As to the WDC stuff, I don't know if the truth is above our reps pay grade, but he has been pretty frank with us in the past and has always been right... Toshiba got all the 3.5" production lines and most of the 3.5" IP that WDC was forced to give up for the sale to go through. WDC got a lot of IP in the purchase and that plus the removal of one of their competitors (a popular one too) was the major thrust behind the purchase. Don't forget that HGST had all the IP that IBM sold over in the first sale, and there is a lot of important patents and tech in there. WDC isn't going to offer a replacement of the 5K3000 and 5K4000 and will just sell remaining product through the channel (3TB seem to be gone now, they are blowing through the remaining 2TB and 1TB). They have segmented their 3.5 into 3 categories... Enterprise, Prosumer and Consumer and already have their own designs and don't really need a 5 platter 5x00 rpm drive right now. The 7K3000 3TB and 4TB may or may not be rebadged at RE drive but no decisions have been made yet. There is still quite a bit of the 7K4000 product left so they don't have to make an immediate decision. Take all this with a grain of salt though, like I said final decisions are made at a much higher pay grade.
 
Hello guys,

could someone tell me where i can buy (online because i cannot find a reseller in Portugal) Areca cards?

I am interested in the:
ARC-1223-8i


Although i would also like this in addition to the first but i cannot find it anywhere:
ARC-1201

Please if possible tell me if it's a trustable store.

Regards.
 
I don't keep up with any stores in Portugal, but scan.co.uk/span.com might ship to you? They're really the only large retailers in Europe that I know of. There's a Spanish distributor on Areca's website, but I don't think they exist anymore going by what is on their website. I've also helped a number of people with these things (and SAS expanders). You can send me a PM if you might consider importing one from the US. I really doubt you will be able to find the 1201 anywhere though. They are extremely uncommon and I have yet to see one for sale outside of the random ones that show up on eBay occasionally.
 
Email me at [email protected] if you can't find them anywhere else. I could probably help you. Been selling Areca controllers for 7+ years now.
 
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Email me at [email protected] if you can't find them anywhere else. I could probably help you. Been selling Areca controllers for 7+ years now.

The email you gave is your direct contact, or i can find someone else reading it ?

By the way, is ArecaDirect or/and ArecaRaid trustable websites ?

Regards.
 
The email you gave is your direct contact, or i can find someone else reading it ?

By the way, is ArecaDirect or/and ArecaRaid trustable websites ?

Regards.

Yes, I handle most requests for Areca controllers from that account. Ship worldwide a lot.
 
Yes, I handle most requests for Areca controllers from that account. Ship worldwide a lot.

I'm sorry, i didn't get it.

You mean from which one of those two ?
ArecaDirect ?
or ArecaRaid ?

Regards.
 
Those two web sites have nothing to do with me and I have no idea how reliable they are.
 
Hi guys,

Is anyone running the Seagate ST3000DM001 on the areca 1680ix-24? trying to find if these drives are compatible with this particular controller.

Cheers
 
Hi guys,

Is anyone running the Seagate ST3000DM001 on the areca 1680ix-24? trying to find if these drives are compatible with this particular controller.

Cheers

We are running a number of them in test systems on 1880 and 1882 controllers with no problems (running the latest firmware). We have replace all our 1680s so I haven't tested these against that controller. That said, you are talking about an unapproved (QVL) drive so YMMV.
 
We are running a number of them in test systems on 1880 and 1882 controllers with no problems (running the latest firmware). We have replace all our 1680s so I haven't tested these against that controller. That said, you are talking about an unapproved (QVL) drive so YMMV.

Cheers for that, its what i thought as well.
 
We are running a number of them in test systems on 1880 and 1882 controllers with no problems (running the latest firmware). We have replace all our 1680s so I haven't tested these against that controller. That said, you are talking about an unapproved (QVL) drive so YMMV.

Unfortunately, that info doesn't help a lot of us with 12xx or 16xx series controllers that are stuck on firmware 1.49 :(
Areca seems to have abandoned firmware support going forward for those controllers despite continuing to sell them online.
 
Unfortunately, that info doesn't help a lot of us with 12xx or 16xx series controllers that are stuck on firmware 1.49 :(
Areca seems to have abandoned firmware support going forward for those controllers despite continuing to sell them online.

I wouldn't consider people abandoned. You need to keep in mind that Areca posts a QVL of supported drives. If you choose drives outside that list which are known to be fine you are on your own. Obvioulsy the reason you chose drives not on the list are either because you want to use the "latest and greatest high density drives" or because you want to use less expensive consumer-orientated drives. You might get lucky that a non-approved series of drives end up working fine, but you are at least as likely if not more likely for them not to operate properly. In the end it is kind of arrogant to buy a piece of hardware that isn't certified for your particular controller (when there is a well-publicized list of what IS certified) and then to bitch that what you bought (and isn't certified to work) didn't work. I am not trying to be bitchy or condescending or anything, I just hear complaints from people who bought an expensive host adapter and then bitch when the cheapest drive they could find has issues with compatibility.
 
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I wouldn't consider people abandoned. You need to keep in mind that Areca posts a QVL of supported drives. If you choose drives outside that list which are known to be fine you are on your own. Obvioulsy the reason you chose drives not on the list are either because you want to use the "latest and greatest high density drives" or because you want to use less expensive consumer-orientated drives. You might get lucky that a non-approved series of drives end up working fine, but you are at least as likely if not more likely for them not to operate properly. In the end it is kind of arrogant to buy a piece of hardware that isn't certified for your particular controller (when there is a well-publicized list of what IS certified) and then to bitch that what you bought (and isn't certified to work) didn't work. I am not trying to be bitchy or condescending or anything, I just hear complaints from people who bought an expensive host adapter and then bitch when the cheapest drive they could find has issues with compatibility.

To be fair though, Areca does not update their supported HDD documentation that often or with many records. Areca will on a rare occasion test a drive, but over years of time I have seen a handful of drives consumer/enterprise get added to the the supported devices pdf. 3TB drives aren't present for WDC. One 3TB enterprise is listed for Seagate. Only one 3TB enterprise drive is listed for Hitachi; Ultrastar 7K4000 drives are absent. 2TB Samsung drives which have been available for years, aren't even listed.

For the most part consumers are guinea pigs doing beta testing for Areca and that's not the best position to be in when you're shelling out $600-1,200 for a controller before buying drives.

Areca HDD Compatibility list (current 5/12/2012)
http://www.areca.us//support/download/RaidCards/Documents/Hardware/HDDCompatibilityList.zip
 
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To be fair though, Areca does not update their supported HDD documentation that often or with many records. Areca will on a rare occasion test a drive, but over years of time I have seen a handful of drives consumer/enterprise get added to the the supported devices pdf. 3TB drives aren't present for Seagate or WDC. Only one 3TB enterprise drive is listed for Hitachi; Ultrastar 7K4000 drives are absent. 2TB Samsung drives which have been available for years, aren't even listed.

For the most part consumers are doing beta testing as guinea pigs for Areca and that's not the best position to be in when you're shelling out $600-1,200 for a controller before buying drives.

I agree wholeheartedly. But if you go to Areca with an "enterprise drive" with an issue (We have on 3 occasions) that isn't on their QVL they will work with you and kick it up to engineering. Three out of three times we were given beta firmware which fixed the issues (and turned up in future public releases) and were happy to work with us. Twice we went with issues related to consumer drives. One of the two they said there was nothing they could do for us (nor would they kick it up to engineering), the second time they only helped because they had already fixed the problem (the same problem which was affecting an "enterprise drive" from the same manufacturer).
 
I agree wholeheartedly. But if you go to Areca with an "enterprise drive" with an issue (We have on 3 occasions) that isn't on their QVL they will work with you and kick it up to engineering. Three out of three times we were given beta firmware which fixed the issues (and turned up in future public releases) and were happy to work with us. Twice we went with issues related to consumer drives. One of the two they said there was nothing they could do for us (nor would they kick it up to engineering), the second time they only helped because they had already fixed the problem (the same problem which was affecting an "enterprise drive" from the same manufacturer).

Also keep in mind that those fixes you mention get added to a development branch and are eventually released in the next stable firmware release cycle (usually once a year.)

For owners of 12xx or 16xx series cards the last firmware release (1.49) was 12/2/2010. Any progress or fixes that help address compatibility with specific models of HDD since 12/2/2010 were added to the devel branch before being released in the 1.50 firmware in January of this year. And as previously mentioned, the 1.50 firmware was only released for the new 188x series.
 
Also keep in mind that those fixes you mention get added to a development branch and are eventually released in the next stable firmware release cycle (usually once a year.)

For owners of 12xx or 16xx series cards the last firmware release (1.49) was 12/2/2010. Any progress or fixes that help address compatibility with specific models of HDD since 12/2/2010 were added to the devel branch before being released in the 1.50 firmware in January of this year. And as previously mentioned, the 1.50 firmware was only released for the new 188x series.

There are also microcode updates that are made in the drivers which fix problems as well, and the latest drivers are only about 8 months old. That said, if you want it to work "out of the box" use the drives they qualify (regardless of how old their QVL is, in this case it shows a release date of 5/2012). Same thing with HP, Dell etc enterprise equipment. If you want a guarantee of compatibility, (and in the HP, Dell etc case availability and guaranteed warranty replacement of the same drive type,) you spend more and you buy what is rock-solid compatible. Everything else YMMV.
 
There are also microcode updates that are made in the drivers which fix problems as well, and the latest drivers are only about 8 months old. That said, if you want it to work "out of the box" use the drives they qualify (regardless of how old their QVL is, in this case it shows a release date of 5/2012). Same thing with HP, Dell etc enterprise equipment. If you want a guarantee of compatibility, (and in the HP, Dell etc case availability and guaranteed warranty replacement of the same drive type,) you spend more and you buy what is rock-solid compatible. Everything else YMMV.

I don't see how this disproves my original assertion that owners of old cards are mostly being abandoned. Sure the drivers may get updated to recognize or add compatibility for new motherboards and those drivers are available to all (either by Areca FTP or direct through submission to a kernel (linux, etc), but most HDD issues involve firmware updates.

I'm not arguing against your notion or assertion of guaranteed compatibility through a top to bottom storage platform offered by an OEM or the amount of money you burn to get that guarantee.
 
I don't see how this disproves my original assertion that owners of old cards are mostly being abandoned. Sure the drivers may get updated to recognize or add compatibility for new motherboards and those drivers are available to all (either by Areca FTP or direct through submission to a kernel (linux, etc), but most HDD issues involve firmware updates.

I'm not arguing against your notion or assertion of guaranteed compatibility through a top to bottom storage platform offered by an OEM or the amount of money you burn to get that guarantee.

You have to keep in mind that manufacturers aren't bound by any convention to offer ANY further updates. They are responsible for repair or replacement of a device found to be faulty due to parts or workmanship. With the 12xxML cards and the 16xx cards, you are buying something that was released almost 6 years ago (an eternity in this business). They are still selling them and they are still making drivers for them. It is up to you to do the proper due diligence as to if they are compatible with your drives, and yes without certified drives you are playing guinea pig . If you want to roll the dice and take your chances with cheapo consumer drives, by all means do so. If you don't want to (or can't or won't bet your job, business etc on the bet), buy drives (QVL or not) that are more likely to operate as they should in a HW RAID environment ("enterprise", RE etc) that have shown reliability and compatibility (TLER, usage pattern etc) with this type of environment and will at least will get you some traction with the manufacturer as "I bought the right drive for the right job" conversation. I am not sitting here arguing on the part of a manufacturer, I am stuck as a buyer and not a seller, I am just giving you the realities of how things do work as opposed to how we would like them to work.
 
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You have to keep in mind that manufacturers aren't bound by any convention to offer ANY further updates. They are responsible for repair or replacement of a device found to be faulty due to parts or workmanship. With the 12xxML cards and the 16xx cards, you are buying something that was released almost 6 years ago (an eternity in this business). They are still selling them and they are still making drivers for them. It is up to you to do the proper due diligence as to if they are compatible with your drives, and yes without certified drives you are playing guinea pig . If you want to roll the dice and take your chances with consumer drives, by all means do so. If you don't want to, buy drives (QVL or not) that are more likely to operate as they should in a HW RAID environment ("enterprise", RE etc) that have show reliability and compatibility (TLER, usage pattern etc) with this type of environment or at least will get you some traction with the manufacturer as "I bought the right drive for the right job" conversation. I too am not sitting here arguing on the part of a manufacturer, I am stuck as a buyer and not a seller.


lol you sure could have fooled me. Every post you've made has mostly been defending the position of Areca or the OEM, including this post (minus the last small note that you are not arguing on the part of the manufacturer lol)

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038879653&postcount=1753

I made the comment Areca is abandoning owners of old cards by not issuing firmware updates for 12xx and 16xx cards, and you're moving away from that. Yes I know when the IOP340 and IOP341 were released. I'm aware there's a compatibility list as well as Areca's infrequency in actually updating it and the risk in playing the guinea pig. I don't see how any of that or the tangent this conversation we've moved into nullifies or changes by observation of Areca choosing to stop updating firmware for old cards that they continue to sell online.
 
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