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

mwroobel said:
1. Enterprise SAS
2. Enterprise SATA
3. Hitachi 5k/7k
4. WD Red
5. Seagate ST3000DM001
Click to expand...

I've been looking at the Enterprise SAS drives, but i just noticed that Areca's handy little compatibility guide only seems to list SATA drives. They list the ST33000650NS (SATA) as compatible, but the ST33000650SS (SAS) version is omitted.
 
FrankieFiero said:
I've been looking at the Enterprise SAS drives, but i just noticed that Areca's handy little compatibility guide only seems to list SATA drives. They list the ST33000650NS (SATA) as compatible, but the ST33000650SS (SAS) version is omitted.
Click to expand...

Unless it has changed recently, the Areca HDD Compatibility list ONLY lists SATA drives (as connected to their SATA and SAS cards). SAS drives are all generally supported, in fact I haven't found a SAS drive yet that wouldn't work well.
 
hello, mwroobel
i use windows 7

problem is in raid5 array of 8 HDDs Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3TB 7200rpm 64MB ST3000DM001
i have no back up.i tried to use R-studio to see what happend with data.it showed me bunch of my folder but with another foldername like $fileiid0000123.its possible to recover..but its 50 000 folders
its about half of array (10tb).
windows always trying to checkdisk at starting.but i always stop it
i cant give u event log because unfourtunally i cleaned it

i have 3 arrays
RAID5 (21tb) in 8 HDDs Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3TB 7200rpm 64MB ST3000DM001
RAID5 (14tb) in 8 HDDs Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB 5400rpm 32MB HD204UI
RAID5 (14tb) in 8 HDDs Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB 5400rpm 32MB HD204WI
its seem to me that problem is in expander..it depend in which way i connect sas cables.only if i connect in 2nd and 3rd cables it see that

u say:
First, make sure that your HBA is updated to the latest code (all 4 files)
what is latest code?

sorry for my bad english
 
<Speech>I will start with my customary RAID is not a backup, it is simply an uptime adjunct.</Speech>
You can always try a recovery app like GetDataBack or Rstudio, it may or may not help. Since chkdksk is starting on boot, there is obviously a problem. To save yourself from the possibility of a recovery making things worse, my first suggestion is going to be to take 8 3TB drives and make image backups of each of the 3TB drives currently in the first array. This way you can always go back to where you are now in case things get worse. I hope this is possible in your situation.
Next, in the future never clear out your log, it can offer invaluable assistance in remedying failures by giving you a historical overview of what actually happened.
How do you currently have your HBA - Expander - Drives currently connected. Which cables are connected to which ports? Which particular model of the 188x do you have?
Next, once we get this settled out (either way) I would suggest both migrating your arrays to RAID6 (which offers you double the failure threshold while still maintaining uptime) and working out some kind of backup workflow.
How important is your data and how much is it worth to you? Is this a business system or a home server?
As to the 4 files, when you do the upgrade there will be 4 files in the upgrade zip, you need to update all of them (BIOS, BOOT, FIRM & MBR0)
 
mwroobel said:
Unless it has changed recently, the Areca HDD Compatibility list ONLY lists SATA drives (as connected to their SATA and SAS cards). SAS drives are all generally supported, in fact I haven't found a SAS drive yet that wouldn't work well.
Click to expand...

I was thinking that was probably the case, but it is comforting to have someone verify before you drop a load of cash on drives. Thanks!
 
I've got an Areca card 1680 where timeouts occur when I attach more than 10 drives. Below that things are fine. I've changed everything bar the card (different chassis / cables / expander / motherboard / power supply etc etc). I guess I could try reseating the fan - anyone have any other ideas?
 
haileris said:
I've got an Areca card 1680 where timeouts occur when I attach more than 10 drives. Below that things are fine. I've changed everything bar the card (different chassis / cables / expander / motherboard / power supply etc etc). I guess I could try reseating the fan - anyone have any other ideas?
Click to expand...

While it is always possible that the card is bad, the first thing I would do is to make sure you have sufficient airflow across the card. In addition, you might want to take off the fan/heatsink combo, wipe off whatever thermal paste is there and apply a new layer of a decent heatsink compound (Arctic Silver, etc).
 
haileris said:
I've got an Areca card 1680 where timeouts occur when I attach more than 10 drives. Below that things are fine. I've changed everything bar the card (different chassis / cables / expander / motherboard / power supply etc etc). I guess I could try reseating the fan - anyone have any other ideas?
Click to expand...
Assuming there's enough juice provided by that power supply, as my last ditch test I try removing everything from the chassis onto a workbench. Having it all spread out not touching each other has helped me uncover ground issues on a single component from time to time hosing the rest of my system up.
 
haileris said:
I've got an Areca card 1680 where timeouts occur when I attach more than 10 drives. Below that things are fine. I've changed everything bar the card (different chassis / cables / expander / motherboard / power supply etc etc). I guess I could try reseating the fan - anyone have any other ideas?
Click to expand...

There is a good chance that vibration limits your ability to add more drives in the setup. What kind of drives do you have? Are they all identical?

Try what VR suggested - remove the drives from your case and hook them up to the controller while they are all placed on a hard and solid surface.
 
@mikeblas

Adding drives into a config one by one, the drives increase vibration being produced by the setup.
When vibration exceeds drive's tolerance threshold drives will start producing random timeouts and if they are part of a RAID set, then controller will start dropping drives out as soon as they stop responding within predefined time frame.

Here, take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all the thoughts chaps - much appreciated. I've recently moved these drives over from a Coolermaster Stacker to a Norco 24 bay - swore I'd never buy one of those but it was a steal at the price :) I'm running snapraid so in theory I don't care too much about timeouts on RAID *but* the problem I have is that when I get a drive that times-out (I get a timeout message in the Areca log and a bunch of arc64.sys reset messages in the Windows event log) it takes down the whole array - no disks are then accessible.

Anyway, only channels 6 and 7 seem to be affected so I've moved the cable to another expander port and so far so good :) I'll reseat the fan tomorrow.

Interesting video btw!
 
haileris said:
I've got an Areca card 1680 where timeouts occur when I attach more than 10 drives. Below that things are fine. I've changed everything bar the card (different chassis / cables / expander / motherboard / power supply etc etc). I guess I could try reseating the fan - anyone have any other ideas?
Click to expand...

It would help if you mentioned what makes/models of drives you're attaching and having problems with. Also what exact model of Areca 1680 (1680i? 1680ix-24? 1680x?) and what model of expander. Have you upgraded the 1680 to the latest 1.51 firmware?
 
My Setup:

- 5.1 MacPro with 3.4 ghz hex core/24gb 1333mhz ram/Mountain Lion 10.8.1
- Areca 1882-ix-12 firmware 1.51/Battery Backup Unit/4gb Cache
- Boot Drive - Pair of 240gb Intel 520 SSD in raid 0 connected to Areca card internal port SFF-8087
- Data Drives - 8 WD RE4 2tb drives in 14tb raid 5 with 128k stripe (all new drives with latest B01 firmware)
- Enclosure - Cineraid CR-T08E enclosure (http://www.cineraid.com/products/editpro_x_t08e.htm) and connected via 2 SFF-8088 mini-sas ports
- Mini-sas adapter - ADP-8873-2X (http://www.cs-electronics.com/mini-sas_adapters.htm) to allow second mini-sas cable to be attached

My Problem:

When testing 8 drive raid 5 with AJA system test or Blackmagic I get reads of 630mbs and writes of 1120mbs...shouldn't the reads be much better in a 8 drive Raid 5 setup? Here is a comparable setup: [url]http://www.arecaus.com/areca_tests_1...33000650ns.htm[/url] I realize those test drives were 6Gb/s SATA and mine are 3Gb/s sata but I still thought I should get much better read speeds? Before I switched to the Cineraid enclosure, I had a internal 6 drive raid 5 setup (same WD drives and Areca card) with read/writes of approx 750/750 mbs...which seems appropriate for that setup. So why are my 8 drive raid 5 read numbers so SLOW?

What I've tried:

1. Tested same 8 drive setup in Raid 0 and saw approx 1350/1350 read/writes...so the system is capable of very fast read/writes.
2. I have tried a variety of different settings on the Areca card and nothing seems to make much difference.
3. Switched out cables.
4. Switched ports on the card.
5. Switched ports on the enclosure.
6. Contacted Cineraid and Areca tech support...still working with both to see if they have any other solutions.

Any thoughts to whats leading to the slow read numbers in my raid 5 setup...I don't think it's a problem with the hard drives because the raid 0 numbers are right where they should be and the raid 5 writes are where they should be, it's only the raid 5 reads that are SLOW.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post.
 
odditory said:
It would help if you mentioned what makes/models of drives you're attaching and having problems with. Also what exact model of Areca 1680 (1680i? 1680ix-24? 1680x?) and what model of expander. Have you upgraded the 1680 to the latest 1.51 firmware?
Click to expand...

Firmware is the latest (1.51). Drives are a mix (Seagate st3000dm001, st2000dl003, st2000dm001, hitachi h3d2003256s, wd wd30ezrx) but the timeout has happened on multiple drives / vendors hence me not mentioning it. Its a 1680x with a HP Expander (2.01, which means I might just buy another chenbro like I did before on one of my other disk storage bays). But only the Areca & the drives (partly) are constants now, everything else has changed.

For now I've increased the timeout and disabled SES2 support to see how it goes.
 
Jus said:
@mikeblas

Adding drives into a config one by one, the drives increase vibration being produced by the setup.
When vibration exceeds drive's tolerance threshold drives will start producing random timeouts and if they are part of a RAID set, then controller will start dropping drives out as soon as they stop responding within predefined time frame.
Click to expand...
I don't think your diagnosis is correct.
 
Hi huys,

I have a MacPro 5,1 and the Areca card 1882x. My plan is to build a RAID 5 system with 8 disks in a Proavio enclosure. Right now I'm testing 3 WD caviar black disks, and they are behaving better than expected. The big problem of the system is that after certain time of not using the system, one of disk fails and then the volume becomes failed and finally degraded. I know that WD caviar disks have troubles with RAID 5 configurations, special because the TLER setting in these disks.

My question is, Should I keep playing with the WD caviar blacks or just forget about them and move to WD RE4?

Cheers
 
dertachyon said:
Hi huys,

I have a MacPro 5,1 and the Areca card 1882x. My plan is to build a RAID 5 system with 8 disks in a Proavio enclosure. Right now I'm testing 3 WD caviar black disks, and they are behaving better than expected. The big problem of the system is that after certain time of not using the system, one of disk fails and then the volume becomes failed and finally degraded. I know that WD caviar disks have troubles with RAID 5 configurations, special because the TLER setting in these disks.

My question is, Should I keep playing with the WD caviar blacks or just forget about them and move to WD RE4?

Cheers
Click to expand...

I would suggest going RAID6 instead of RAID5 (extra parity drive gives you a better chance of uptime or rebuild success) and if you have the $$$ (and want to stick with WDC) then go with either the RE4 SATA (Or even better, SAS (again, if you have the $$$)) or the WD Red.
 
Putting this in the thread, because one of the big options I am looking at is in the areca ARC-1882 series. I am open to about any suggestion. The current setup sucks. Budget is $1000 to $1500 drives and all.

Currently I am using a leased Dell T3500 Precision as a server for a production line DVR. (Production line = out on the floor watching production machines for quality issues or operator errors.) Currently the DVR is using 3 WD3200AAKS drives in a RAID5 using the Intel RST raid software. Simply put, it sucks, it's hard to do anything at all in the os, it is so slow.

I would like to either upgrade to a RAID10 continuing to use the RST if it will be stable and functional. If that is just not wise, I am open to spending money on external raid cards and drives. I am just lost on where to start. How do I move from RST software raid to actual hardware raid card? Is that something ghost or acronis can do? Google searches haven't gotten me anywhere on the topic. The DVR for storage purposes is offloading the video to a qnap NAS nightly, so it doesn't have to be very large local storage. It's only for the OS and DVR software.

I am also concerned about the future, when the lease is up and we move to our next leased machine. How well does an external raid card work in that instance? Would it be best to use something like vmware player to boot an image and then when the lease is up, just simply move the image over to the next computer?

As you can see, I am open to many suggestions? Thanks for any input, feel free to move this to another thread if it's not appropriate for this one.
 
The RAID is 5x3T Seagate SATA, recently deployed.
With no prior errors, one drive shows a Time Out Error.
When I opened the web page, it showed 2 RAIDs with the same name. One had 4 drives with one missing, and the other had one drive (the one that timed out) with 4 missing.
I added a new drive and the first RAID (with 4 drives) instantly grabbed it and started rebuilding.

I'll run the drive with the Time Out through Seagate diagnostics. Meanwhile, any opinions? I'm used to having this system run just about error-free.
 
Can you post the full log from before the problem started through the entire event until today please?
 
odditory said:
Yep, finally.. was playing around with 1.51 earlier today, thanks for posting up the links. Successfully tested smartmontools is now able to see through Areca 1880 + expander to the SMART info of individual disks - not just passthrough disks but even those in raidsets, perform drive tests, etc. I tested with windows version of smartctl, using the following command to print all smart info for 1st disk of the 1st enclosure (expander) on the 1st Areca controller:

smartctl -a -d areca,1/1 /dev/arcmsr0

the numberic values in the example mean the following:

smartctl -a -d areca,<drive#>/<expander#> /dev/arcmsr<areca controller# ie 0 for first, 1 for second, etc>
Click to expand...

Just wanted to add this is not working for an 1680i card on v1.51 firmware with an HP expander.
 
For those of you who'd like a silent Areca system (I have a 1882IX24 and the fan is way too noisy for me, since the Norco 4220 Chassis is in my office).

I use this : Link

It's basically a 2 slot PCI bracket held device with 2x120mm Fan, it's very silent, but is quite close to the MB (needed to use angled Sata Cables on the mobo)

I just unplugged the little 40mm Areca Fan (which I didnt trust) and unchecked the box "CPU Fan Detection" in the Areca web interface. No hardware changes were made on the board so I should be fine if I ever need to RMA it.

Monitoring the 1882 CPU gives me the same temps of approximately 60°C @ idle.
 
Have you done some benchmark on your 1882i ? and is you happy with it ? i am thinking of getting one too for my cloud build
 
FYI for anyone not already aware, latest Areca 6.20.00.22 64-bit 2008R2 drivers working fine in Windows Server 2012.
 
Zakari said:
For those of you who'd like a silent Areca system (I have a 1882IX24 and the fan is way too noisy for me, since the Norco 4220 Chassis is in my office).

I use this : Link

It's basically a 2 slot PCI bracket held device with 2x120mm Fan, it's very silent, but is quite close to the MB (needed to use angled Sata Cables on the mobo)

I just unplugged the little 40mm Areca Fan (which I didnt trust) and unchecked the box "CPU Fan Detection" in the Areca web interface. No hardware changes were made on the board so I should be fine if I ever need to RMA it.

Monitoring the 1882 CPU gives me the same temps of approximately 60°C @ idle.
Click to expand...

Thank you for posting this, I was about to ask about the noise of the Areca stock fan. I guess it is to noisy for an office environment. I put some effort in the cooling of my server case, it is nearly silent when idle and does not roast my drives during summer.
Do the Areca drivers (i.e. Linux) enable temperature readings from the host or is it only available through the web interface?

Do recent Linux Areca drivers (arcmsr) allocate multiple MSI-X vectors or only a single one?
 
Last edited:
Anyone ever had an issue posting a system with an Areca card and it crashing the bios of the machine on boot with storage pluged in? I have a Dell R320 i just bought with a Norco DS-24E attached to an Areca 1882X with 16 3TB WD Reds. I built a raid 6 out of the WD Reds to get 42TB. When my DS-24E is now pluged into my Areca in my Dell the bios actually crashes later into the bootup before it attempts to start windows.

Would this be on the Areca side or Dell side?
 
I just bought an Areca ARC-1210 SATA RAID card although I did not receive it yet. I am going through the user manual and I am trying to figure out in what capacity this card/software reports hard drive S.M.A.R.T. data to the user. Until now I was using standalone drives and drives in ICH10R RAID arrays and they were all successfully probed by CrystalDiskInfo which worked great. I liked how it showed all S.M.A.R.T. attributes including the RAW (actual) values. Looking at the ARC-1210 manual I only see a few attributes reported (Read Error Rate, Spinup Time, Reallocation Count, Seek Error Rate, Spinup Retries, Calibration Retries). And that is in McBIOS and it appears it only shows "Current/Normalized", "Worst" and "Threshold" which are useless (not raw values). Is that it ?? Or does the thing show all drive supported attributes in Windows software as well, like RAW (!) values for "Write Error Rate", "Uncorrectable Sector Count" and "Current Pending Sector Count" ?

The reason I ask is because I switched from Seagate to Western Digital drives a couple of years ago and I noticed that "Reallocation count" carries little meaning with WD drives as opposed to Seagate ones. I never had a reallocated sector counter go up on a WD drive, but I have had drives die. With WD the counters for "Uncorrectable Sector Count", "Current Pending Sector Count" and "Write Error Rate" are most important. When these start rising, drive performance tends to decrease and/or drives start dying. So these are the attributes I need to have available for monitoring within Windows somehow. Does this card/software offer that ? Does anyone know if CrystalDiskInfo is able to see the drives attached to ARC-1210 and read their S.M.A.R.T. data ?
 
Last edited:
Jeroen1000 said:
Just wanted to add this is not working for an 1680i card on v1.51 firmware with an HP expander.
Click to expand...

I vaguely remember back that either houk or odditory had gotten Areca to update the code for pass-through for SMART but as I remember it was only for the 188x series of boards, not the 16 series boards.
 
cbiggers said:
Anyone ever had an issue posting a system with an Areca card and it crashing the bios of the machine on boot with storage pluged in? I have a Dell R320 i just bought with a Norco DS-24E attached to an Areca 1882X with 16 3TB WD Reds. I built a raid 6 out of the WD Reds to get 42TB. When my DS-24E is now pluged into my Areca in my Dell the bios actually crashes later into the bootup before it attempts to start windows.

Would this be on the Areca side or Dell side?
Click to expand...

Cases such as this are not specific to Areca, it is usually (when it is not a hardware problem) where the MB BIOS is out of option ROM space. First try to disable anything you aren't using (onboard Wifi, Serial/Parallel/USB ports, eSata etc). How many other HBA's are in the machine? 10GE, other drive controllers, etc?
 
Perplexer- said:
I just bought an Areca ARC-1210 SATA RAID card although I did not receive it yet. I am going through the user manual and I am trying to figure out in what capacity this card/software reports hard drive S.M.A.R.T. data to the user. Until now I was using standalone drives and drives in ICH10R RAID arrays and they were all successfully probed by CrystalDiskInfo which worked great. I liked how it showed all S.M.A.R.T. attributes including the RAW (actual) values. Looking at the ARC-1210 manual I only see a few attributes reported (Read Error Rate, Spinup Time, Reallocation Count, Seek Error Rate, Spinup Retries, Calibration Retries). And that is in McBIOS and it appears it only shows "Current/Normalized", "Worst" and "Threshold" which are useless (not raw values). Is that it ?? Or does the thing show all drive supported attributes in Windows software as well, like RAW (!) values for "Write Error Rate", "Uncorrectable Sector Count" and "Current Pending Sector Count" ?

The reason I ask is because I switched from Seagate to Western Digital drives a couple of years ago and I noticed that "Reallocation count" carries little meaning with WD drives as opposed to Seagate ones. I never had a reallocated sector counter go up on a WD drive, but I have had drives die. With WD the counters for "Uncorrectable Sector Count", "Current Pending Sector Count" and "Write Error Rate" are most important. When these start rising, drive performance tends to decrease and/or drives start dying. So these are the attributes I need to have available for monitoring within Windows somehow. Does this card/software offer that ? Does anyone know if CrystalDiskInfo is able to see the drives attached to ARC-1210 and read their S.M.A.R.T. data ?
Click to expand...

I don't remember if the 1210 had accessible passthrough or not.... Download a copy of HD Sentinel, it was the best for probing HBA's for the SMART on attached drives and see if you can get the info.
 
ARC-1680 Time Out Error, pt 2

This has now happened two more times. The log below is in reverse chronological order, the sequence from my point of view was:
- Restart server
- Everything is OK
- The beeper goes off
- Silence it
- Look at Information >> RAID Set Heierarchy, notice that one drive (PHY#8) is not available and its rebuilding with the Hot Spare (PHY#9)
- Pull PHY#8, insert PHY#10
- Look at Information >> RAID Set Heierarchy, notice that PHY#10 has automatically been claimed as a new Hot Spare.

The event log:

2012-11-13 08:56:28 Enc#2 PHY#10 Device Inserted
2012-11-13 08:51:30 192.168.001.106 HTTP Log In
2012-11-13 08:50:52 ARC-1680-VOL#001 Start Rebuilding
2012-11-13 08:50:50 Enc#2 PHY#8 Device Removed
2012-11-13 08:50:50 Raid Set # 001 Rebuild RaidSet
2012-11-13 08:50:50 Raid Set # 001 RaidSet Degraded
2012-11-13 08:50:48 ARC-1680-VOL#001 Volume Degraded
2012-11-13 08:50:46 Enc#2 PHY#8 Time Out Error
2012-11-12 04:47:46 H/W Monitor Raid Powered On

Here's what the Information window looks like now:

RaidSet Hierarchy
RAID Set Devices Volume Set(Ch/Id/Lun) Volume State Capacity
Raid Set # 001 E#2PHY#5 ARC-1680-VOL#001(0/0/1) Rebuilding(1.8%) 9000.0GB
E#2PHY#9&#8592;
E#2PHY#7
E#2PHY#3
E#2PHY#6

Enclosure#1 : ARECA SAS RAID AdapterV1.0
Device Usage Capacity Model
Slot#1 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#2 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#3 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#4 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#5 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#6 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#7 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Slot#8 N.A. N.A. N.A.
Enclosure#2 : L-1280 SASx12 A.0 [5001CF200003013F]
Device Usage Capacity Model
PHY#2 N.A. N.A. N.A.
PHY#3(0:0) Raid Set # 001 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166
PHY#4 N.A. N.A. N.A.
PHY#5(0:1) Raid Set # 001 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166
PHY#6(0:2) Raid Set # 001 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166
PHY#7(0:3) Raid Set # 001 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166
PHY#8 N.A. N.A. N.A.
PHY#9(0:5) Raid Set # 001 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166
PHY#10(0:6) Hot Spare 3000.6GB ST3000VX000-9YW166 [Global]
PHY#11 N.A. N.A. N.A.

More detail:
The ARECA-1680 card is in a SuperMicro 1U server. It's connected by an SFF-8088 cable to a 12-bay enclosure called a DS-1280.

I have two identical setups. What's been happening is that over the past year, certain of the slots are apparently failing -- after powering everything off and back on, the RAID card fails to register drives plugged in to those slots.

I ran the Seagate test suites on the drives that disconnected and they come up clean.

Does anyone know anything about these enclosures, how to test, etc? They were purchased in 2010.
 
pmackinney said:
I ran the Seagate test suites on the drives that disconnected and they come up clean.

Does anyone know anything about these enclosures, how to test, etc? They were purchased in 2010.
Click to expand...

As I remember, if you are referring to a Habey DS-1280 they had some enclosures out there with flakey expanders and some with bad backplanes. Contact Habey to see if your serial number is one of the affected units.
 
Thanks mwroobel, I've done that. Their website is minimal but did have an email address. If anyone's tracking this stuff, my S/Ns are: 5001CF200003013F & 5001CF20000307BF.
 
Perplexer- said:
I just bought an Areca ARC-1210 SATA RAID card although I did not receive it yet. I am going through the user manual and I am trying to figure out in what capacity this card/software reports hard drive S.M.A.R.T. data to the user. Until now I was using standalone drives and drives in ICH10R RAID arrays and they were all successfully probed by CrystalDiskInfo which worked great. I liked how it showed all S.M.A.R.T. attributes including the RAW (actual) values. Looking at the ARC-1210 manual I only see a few attributes reported (Read Error Rate, Spinup Time, Reallocation Count, Seek Error Rate, Spinup Retries, Calibration Retries). And that is in McBIOS and it appears it only shows "Current/Normalized", "Worst" and "Threshold" which are useless (not raw values). Is that it ?? Or does the thing show all drive supported attributes in Windows software as well, like RAW (!) values for "Write Error Rate", "Uncorrectable Sector Count" and "Current Pending Sector Count" ?

The reason I ask is because I switched from Seagate to Western Digital drives a couple of years ago and I noticed that "Reallocation count" carries little meaning with WD drives as opposed to Seagate ones. I never had a reallocated sector counter go up on a WD drive, but I have had drives die. With WD the counters for "Uncorrectable Sector Count", "Current Pending Sector Count" and "Write Error Rate" are most important. When these start rising, drive performance tends to decrease and/or drives start dying. So these are the attributes I need to have available for monitoring within Windows somehow. Does this card/software offer that ? Does anyone know if CrystalDiskInfo is able to see the drives attached to ARC-1210 and read their S.M.A.R.T. data ?
Click to expand...

With the right firmware I dont see why it wouldn't work. My dad's machine is windows (i normally use linux/smartmontools). He had crystaldiskinfo installed and I was actually very surprised it was able to read the smart info on the drives behind the ARC-1222 controller (it had the newer firmware with smart info pass through support though). The 1210/1220 are the older SATA only controllers so even the really old firmwares shoudl support it.
 
I've added a number of disks to an ARC1880ix-24 that I'd like to burn in test for SIDs. DBAN isn't really an option since the server is up and doing other tasks.

What tool are you guys liking for stressing disks inside of Windows?
 
haileris said:
Firmware is the latest (1.51). Drives are a mix (Seagate st3000dm001, st2000dl003, st2000dm001, hitachi h3d2003256s, wd wd30ezrx) but the timeout has happened on multiple drives / vendors hence me not mentioning it. Its a 1680x with a HP Expander (2.01, which means I might just buy another chenbro like I did before on one of my other disk storage bays). But only the Areca & the drives (partly) are constants now, everything else has changed.

For now I've increased the timeout and disabled SES2 support to see how it goes.
Click to expand...

How did it go, chasing down that vibration theory?
 
Hello all. First post here. I actually stick around the FreeNAS forums alot. Anyway, I have a Window Server(2008 R2) and I'm trying to setup SMART testing on a 1280ML-24port. The server has been up for about 2 years, but I recently updated the drivers to the latest and installed the CLI. The server has 2xRAID6 arrays. Array one consists of 16x2TB drives and array 2 consists of 6x3TB drives.

So I read the CLI manual and found that I can run SMART tests and obtain SMART data using the CLI. So I tried to run the command "disk sttest drv=1 mode=short" and I got the error "ErrMsg: Drive# Is Not Available Or Not Free". I get this error on all of my disks. I then tried a mode=extended and I got the same thing.

Do I have to offline the disk from the array to run the SMART tests or what am I doing wrong? I've tried Google and I ended up in this thread.

I'm looking at switching this server over to FreeNAS in the future, but I don't have a timetable for that yet. But I figured I could at least run some SMART tests and see if these drives are worth keeping around before I make the switch to FreeNAS.
 
Areca CLI Help.

Hi Areca users - I am new to the CLI and was looking for some pointer on how I can unmount a RaidSet using CLI. I have two Areca cards in the system and I would like to unmount the RaidSet in Card #2 called "RAID6 2TB". Can someone help me with the syntax?

By default, it appears CLI is set to my first card. How do I select the second card?

Also, is there a way for me to set up a windows batch file that will unmount the raidset without going into the CLI?

Thank you!

Hammer8
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top