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areca interchangeability?

W

wkearney99

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 8, 2010
Messages
370
Should it be possible to swap out an Areca 1260 for a 1230 and have everything still work ok?

I've got a windows 7 x64 box that has a 1260 in it and I want to replace that with a 1230. I want to use the 16 port card in another machine. I swapped the cards and the the OS appears to boot but then spontaneously reboots. Booting in safe mode shows 'disk.sys' to be the last thing loading before the reboot. This is not a blue screen, just a hard reset. Both cards have the same 1.49 firmware. Both have the battery backup, the same one that's always been connected to each. I moved the cards and batteries as a pair. I have not put the 1260 into the other box yet.

The firmware in the 1230, and the web interface both show that the RAID and volume sets are present and working properly. When the OS boots it shows the correct boot menu. So it's not like the volumes aren't getting connected.

I'm puzzled here, is there something different about the 1230 from the 1260 that would matter? They were both installed using the same x64 version of the storport driver. I don't have a spare x4 slot in this particular machine so I can't have both cards installed at the same time.
 
check with Areca tech support... they will give you a suggestion.

I do not own Areca card.
I do have Adaptec Card, moving configuration to another adaptec raid card is just unplunging the card and plug back a replacement card, they stress some limitations, just make sure everything in your scope.
well, I did make a backup before replacing to a new card... just peace in mind
 
Hmmm, tried swapping in a 1210 and got the same reboot problem. Sets are still fine. I'll swap back the original card. I'll be one unhappy camper if that acts up too...
 
Managed to get the motherboard to boot without a PCIe video card installed. Apparently one of their BIOS updates eliminated that previous requirement. Trying to use windows on an ancient video card at 640x480 is an experience I'd hoped to forget.

So I plugged the 1230 in there and got the machine to boot with both controllers installed. This was apparently enough to allow the driver to boot and accept a second card being present. A subsequent reboot likewise worked with the 1260 removed and the 1230 put in it's place.

I'm sure some of this is attributable to windows nonsense, but I'd have to imagine there's something about the way the areca driver functions that ought to be able to deal with this. So anyone looking to swap areca cards better be ready for issues. They ought to be interchangeable and compatible enough to make it a simple exchange. But if not then you're going to have to get both cards installed at the same time. Hopefully you'll have enough slots to do it. If not I don't know what you'd have to do. Hopefully that's enough search terms to lead someone here if they have the same problem.

Meanwhile I've got my 1260 free and ready to take it's place in a new ZFS server. I'm hoping to compare performance between the the 1260 passing drives versus an M1015. I've got enough drives to make an even comparison. I'm debating whether to use the 1260 with it's 16 ports or use a pair of M1015s instead. I'm specifically wondering about total throughput across multiple drives.

More on that in another thread.
 
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