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

I've used 8x Seagate ST32000542AS with a 3Ware 9590SE-16ML without any problems in a raid5 configuration.

Three days ago i migrated them to an Areca 1880ix-16 and had massive problems with timeouts/dropouts (-> the eventlog filled up nearly instantly after creating the Raid/Volumeset).

After reading this --> http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1036755850#post1036755850 (Post 901-906), i upgraded them to firmware CC35 and so far the problem seems to have gone.

Btw i had to use the (forced flash) method described here --> http://niallbest.com/seagate-2tb-st32000542as-cc35-firmware-upgrade/ to upgrade the firmware to CC35.
 
Jus said:
:) It did not take too long to see why those Seagate drives should be avoided. They are probably fine for a standalone config, but by their nature not designed to run RAIDed
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They probably don't like being hardware RAIDed. I'm sure a software RAID solution would be OK. A friend of mine has two pairs of these (the 1TB model) running in two Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo cases (with the crappy on-board firmware RAID controller running them in RAID 0), and they've been solid.

I guess it depends on the controller.
 
Jus said:
:) It did not take too long to see why those Seagate drives should be avoided.
Click to expand...
I've got two different machines using those drives in arrays on areca cards. They've been working fine for several months. Granted, I don't have any power-saving features enabled. They're just platters spinning in support of a RAID5 and a RAID10 array.
 
I have all of the power saving features disabled on the card. I am running CC34 (which could be a problem). As of now, I've had one time-out and it did not fail the array, which is a step up from the 3Ware card that I was previously using. I've copied about 450GB of VM's to it across the network and no issues there. I'm about to kick off a copy from my Hitachi array to my Seagate array that is roughly 600GB, so we will see how that works out!

What firmware are you running? What stripe size and any other settings do you have set up for your Seagate arrays?

wkearney99 said:
I've got two different machines using those drives in arrays on areca cards. They've been working fine for several months. Granted, I don't have any power-saving features enabled. They're just platters spinning in support of a RAID5 and a RAID10 array.
Click to expand...
 
wkearney99 said:
I've got two different machines using those drives in arrays on areca cards. They've been working fine for several months. Granted, I don't have any power-saving features enabled. They're just platters spinning in support of a RAID5 and a RAID10 array.
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You did not say what particular models you have, but I'd guess those are SATA cards, not SAS ones. Check Areca's HDD compatibility list and you will see that while some drives are marked as compatible with SATA controller, they are not with SAS.
In your case, you may want to consider yourself lucky, unless you are a storage expert.

My point here is that statistically Seagate green drives have been the worst for RAID applications followed by WD green non-RE drives. I do not even take into account Maxtor drives, those are history now, they were exceptionally bad and even had a special treat in Areca's BIOS.
Drives must be fully controlled by a RAID card and should not have minds of their own, then you may expect your storage to be stable.

By saying you have those drives running perfectly in RAID5 and RAID10 configs, you give a false sense of hope to others who unknowingly might refer to your words and buy those drives. Those drives by default come with the green features enabled and the greater half of the users won't even know how to disable them if it is possible at all.

IMHO, it would be better if you have listed your system configurations so people could copy them and have same positive experience as well.
 
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Hello,

I have an areca 1880-i raid card. Works Great.I bought an expander because i need more then 8 hard drives. The model i bought is this one chenbro CK12803 http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=73
I have only one pci-e port so i use a pci port. Card boots without any problem.
I have an issue when i'm in the areca biso after 3 or 4 minutes the bios doesn't respond anymore and i have to reboot the computer.
I don't have this problem when i plug my hard drives on the areca.
I don't use any 6gb/s hard drives for the moment.
Someone had already this problem? I searched on all forums without finding something.

Thanks,

Greg
 
gregsam said:
Hello,

I have an areca 1880-i raid card. Works Great.I bought an expander because i need more then 8 hard drives. The model i bought is this one chenbro CK12803 http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=73
I have only one pci-e port so i use a pci port. Card boots without any problem.
I have an issue when i'm in the areca biso after 3 or 4 minutes the bios doesn't respond anymore and i have to reboot the computer.
I don't have this problem when i plug my hard drives on the areca.
I don't use any 6gb/s hard drives for the moment.
Someone had already this problem? I searched on all forums without finding something.

Thanks,

Greg
Click to expand...

EDIT: Misunderstood your question. Looks like Alamone got it right.
 
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Chenbro expanders DO NOT work with Areca 1880i cards. They will detect initially and may even work for a short period of time, but eventually they will cause the Areca to become non-responsive. I've tried both original and enhanced firmware on the Chenbro. After replacing with the Intel SAS expander my Areca has been rock solid.

The Chenbro expander works without issue on my Rocketraid 4320 if I jumper to "original" firmware mode. So either swap your raid card or your expander - I would suggest the latter as I much prefer using an Areca card than a Highpoint card.
 
Well..after the loan time-out that occurred right after the array was initialized it has been solid without issues. So far I have copied a little over a TB of data two it without issue. I think for now I'll keep it around as my secondary RAID for back-up purposes and perhaps overflow if my primary array fills up.
 
The Intel SAS expander card can be powered from either a PCI express slot OR from the molex connector.

Thus, you can:

1. Connect it to a PCIe slot and power it from the PCIe slot. Note that if you plan on using with a PCIe 1x or 4x slot, it should be open ended, as I believe the card is physically 8x size.

2. Connect it to an empty slot (e.g. you have a microATX board but an ATX case) and power by molex.

3. Connect it to a PCI slot using standoffs on the screw mount and power by molex.

4. Screw it anywhere in the case you have standoffs, or use velcro, and power by molex.

In the case of options 2-4, I would put some electrical tape on the PCIe connector to avoid potential shorting. I also put a fan on top of the heatsink just to be on the safe side, but I think it works fine without it.
 
OK great thanks for the advices.
Quite difficult to find this card in europe.
I think i have to buy in the states
 
I have a pair of ARC-1880ix-24 drive controllers, and I just changed the passwords on them from ‘0000’ to an alphanumeric string (no special characters, no spaces). I can no longer log into them. The master password in the OP doesn't work, at least not with 'admin' or blank usernames. Tech support goes to a t-mobile cellphone that rings and goes to voicemail. No response all day from the tech support email address on the website ([email protected]). Anyone have any ideas?
 
did you try the master password in the boot-time BIOS menu rather than the web admin? I tried it on an 1880i and it worked fine.

and "no response all day" from areca support is likely because they're on the other side of the world.
 
Jus said:
OK, try this:
1. Delete definitions of all existing arrays if any.
2. Switch visual presentation to view the list of the channels.
3. For every channel use the Unplug button to evict the drives one by one from the config.

This should disable whatever the controller does to the drives during initialization.
Click to expand...

tried everything, could not get the drives to appear correctly under another controller. Put them all back on the highpoint in raid 5, and they work no problem.

I may need to contact highpoint support, but they are pretty terrible the few times I did need them, and they may not even support me because its out of warranty. :(
 
:) Would love to get those drives in my possession for a little while. Quite a challenge to find out how to get under their skin and make them work on Areca controllers. Strange and interesting, very interesting!
 
Maybe a dumb question... but is there a way on the Areca cards to get 2 controllers pointed to the same set of disk spindles to establish redundancy at a controller card level?
 
You'd need dual port SAS drives for starters, and then its a question of whether Areca's firmware also supports it, which I haven't heard of anyone testing. That would tend to be more of a business problem anyway.
 
As odditory and Jus said, the master password doesn't work in the web interface, only the BIOS. What I found out from Areca support is that the maximum password length is 16 characters. Truncating the password that I set to 15 (not 16) characters let me log into the web interface.


echo465 said:
I have a pair of ARC-1880ix-24 drive controllers, and I just changed the passwords on them from ‘0000’ to an alphanumeric string (no special characters, no spaces). I can no longer log into them. The master password in the OP doesn't work, at least not with 'admin' or blank usernames. Tech support goes to a t-mobile cellphone that rings and goes to voicemail. No response all day from the tech support email address on the website ([email protected]). Anyone have any ideas?
Click to expand...
 
Hey All! I am new to the forum, but have been a lurker for a long time. Anyway, I am a newbie when it comes to RAIDs and things, but I am experiencing an interesting problem and thought I would ask folks in here as you are all very knowledgeable. I just purchased my first RAID card last week -ARC 1222- for a media server build. I have flashed all of the firmware to the latest and greatest along with most current drivers etc. I am using 8 x WD2002FYPS (RE4-GP) 2TB drives in a RAID5 configuration (also running the latest firmware, 0405G05). Anyway, I was transferring over all of my data from my old media server to my current one, and when I hit my WEB DEV directory (every attempt like clockwork too...only directory that has gazillions, ~2GB, of tiny html/php files), my transfer task freezes and have to kill the task to recover the system. When I log into the Web Manager, several disks are listed as dropped out in the event logs, then appear as drive detected. Checking the RAID Hierarchy health status shows all 8 drives fine with no issues (only when I attempt to copy over a directory with tons of tiny files). And I have transferred over nearly 2TB of photos, music, and movies since with no issues at all. My problem is that the drive in slot 1 is not active in the array (even though it shows healthy and fine in the Web Manager), and that the RAID status says Rebuild Needed/Mode Degraded. I have Prioroity set to High, and in close to 3 days time, the array has not started a rebuild/repair automatically. Even the event log since the incident shows Raid Rebuild...yet nothing is happening; no activity lights or anything on any of the drives...so obviously no repair is going on. I have write caching set to Write Through too if this helps (BBU not in use). Am I missing something here? Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I am not sure what to check for next. Please also let me know if you need any additional information too. Thanks in advance!

V/R

ABSiNTH
 
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Ok all, here is my RAID Hierarchy:



And here are my events:





Any help or pointers in the right direction would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance!

V/R

ABSiNTH
 
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Ok cool...does anyone see something amiss here? I apologize if its a newbie mistake, but Im not sure what to do to get the array to repair itself. I removed the disk drive from slot 1 and reinserted it (please see my first post #1102), but the array still has yet to attempt to repair.
 
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@ABsinth: its unusual, so I would start by sending an email to support [at] areca [dot] com [dot] tw

There are things that can be tried but before that its better to document it with them. Attach those screenshots to your email and try to boil your problem description down into 2 or 3 sentences. In general, tech support depts. don't respond as well to multi-thought emails or those with very lengthy explanations.
 
odditory said:
@ABsinth: its unusual, so I would start by sending an email to support [at] areca [dot] com [dot] tw

There are things that can be tried but before that its better to document it with them. Attach those screenshots to your email and try to boil your problem description down into 2 or 3 sentences. In general, tech support depts. don't respond as well to multi-thought emails or those with very lengthy explanations.
Click to expand...

Thank you. I am typing them an email as we speak; just wondered if there was anything else I should check or look at etc.
 
vr. said:
To folks that are recommending Hitachi with Areca... there are currently three flavors of 3 TB Hitachi on Newegg. Which one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145472

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145471

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145477
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The Ultrastar is Hitachi's enterprise line, but the Deskstar supposedly works just as well so save your money. Not sure what that one is without an image. I just bought an Areca 1280ML and four Hitachi 3TB drives (your first link), so they better work! :)
 
vr. said:
To folks that are recommending Hitachi with Areca... there are currently three flavors of 3 TB Hitachi on Newegg. Which one?
Click to expand...

all depends what you plan to do with the drives. if you're just storing data longterm, like archiving blurays/dvd/music, then absolutely the best choice is the 2TB 5K3000- I've been putting 16 of them through their paces since a few weeks and REALLY liking them since they run so cool and perform similarly to my previous gen 7K2000 7200RPM hitachi's in sequential I/O operations (array builds and rebuilds, large file transfers of 20-30TB at a time).

they've been down as low as $60 with rebates recently- and last week Amazon was selling them for $69. if you're planning on doing things like video editing where performance is a consideration then I'd suggest one of the newer 7K3000 7200RPM models. you can't go wrong with any of them.
 
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Question:

Now that the 3TB drives are making it to the market in mass quantity what is the upgrade path to the current users of 1TB-2TB drives who are hurting on space? Is it possible to replace an existing drive on the Areca controllers with a larger size drive and as the entire cluster of drives are upgraded to grow the current raidset/volume?
 
pyrodex said:
Question:

Now that the 3TB drives are making it to the market in mass quantity what is the upgrade path to the current users of 1TB-2TB drives who are hurting on space? Is it possible to replace an existing drive on the Areca controllers with a larger size drive and as the entire cluster of drives are upgraded to grow the current raidset/volume?
Click to expand...

You'd have to replace all the drives on the array to increase space. So if you have a 100GB and 3x200GB drives, you'll only be able to use 100GB of each of those drives.
 
Some more information would be useful.

What controller do you have?
How many empty HDD slots do you have? Which case?
 
protias said:
You'd have to replace all the drives on the array to increase space. So if you have a 100GB and 3x200GB drives, you'll only be able to use 100GB of each of those drives.
Click to expand...
Thats what I thought, just wanted to see if anyone had done or confirmed this. I'd figure the new space won't be visible until all the drives align in space.
 
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