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

Does anyone know if is there any software that you can use to check SMART errors of each disks in the Areca 1880i?
And also is there any way to benchmark a single drive inside a Raid volume?
 
I've opened up my machine. The backplane has 4 mini-SAS connectors. Each of those splits out to 4 separate sata connectors that are connected to the Areca controller. I suddenly remember that I didn't buy the mini-SAS version a few years back ;-)

Everything seems OK connection wise.

I'm thinking about cloning the four failed disks to fresh disks of the same model and size. dd or ddrescue seems the way to go. Then I'll put the clones back in their original positions and try again. I think a RESCUE will be required after that. If the cloning even works, that is.

Does this have any chance of success?
 
bekax5 said:
Does anyone know if is there any software that you can use to check SMART errors of each disks in the Areca 1880i?
And also is there any way to benchmark a single drive inside a Raid volume?
Click to expand...

Speedfan has the ability to check the individual disks in an array. Has basic check and "extended" check/explanation that takes you to a webpage if you're internet connected.
 
WangChung said:
Speedfan has the ability to check the individual disks in an array. Has basic check and "extended" check/explanation that takes you to a webpage if you're internet connected.
Click to expand...

That's what I was searching for thanks a lot =)
And do you know if it is possible to benchmark individual disks ?
My volumes have been "degrading" a bit over time and I wanted to check individual disks to see if is there a "special one".
 
Loving my 1883ix-24 :) Only big complaint is that as I use this in a workstation environment, the vacuum cleaner noise of the cooling fan is about five different kinds of irritating. Any suggestions on what I can do to mod or replace the fan on this thing?
 
The Real Zardoz said:
Loving my 1883ix-24 :) Only big complaint is that as I use this in a workstation environment, the vacuum cleaner noise of the cooling fan is about five different kinds of irritating. Any suggestions on what I can do to mod or replace the fan on this thing?
Click to expand...

Well, you could always just replace the fan with a quieter one, but what I did was CAREFULLY remove the heat sink, wipe off the crappy thermal compound they used and install either Arctic Silver 5 (Which is what I used) or your favorite thermal compound. That was enough for the card in my personal workstation to quiet down a bit. A lot depends on your particular case and its own thermal idiosyncrasies, remember these are enterprise-level cards which are made to be reliable (meaning it manages the thermal capacity of the card) not to be quiet.
 
Just wondering, I have an Areca 1222 card. I enabled a weekly scrub. But it just keeps starting over in the background, even when it is completed. It just starts over and over every time. Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers!
K.

This is what the log shows=

2015-02-09 12:46:06 Proxy Or Inband HTTP Log In
2015-02-09 12:45:31 ARC-1222-VOL#000 Stop Checking 002:47:58 0/0
2015-02-09 09:57:34 ARC-1222-VOL#000 Start Checking
2015-02-09 08:37:01 H/W Monitor Raid Powered On
2015-02-09 00:16:13 ARC-1222-VOL#000 Abort Checking 006:21:07 0/0
2015-02-08 21:53:51 Proxy Or Inband HTTP Log In
2015-02-08 19:40:52 Proxy Or Inband HTTP Log In
2015-02-08 17:55:09 ARC-1222-VOL#000 Start Checking
2015-02-08 16:34:35 H/W Monitor Raid Powered On
2015-02-08 16:33:18 H/W Monitor Raid Powered On
2015-02-08 15:57:51 H/W Monitor Raid Powered On
2015-02-07 18:49:43 ARC-1222-VOL#000 Complete Check 005:41:23 0/0
 
Good day... does somebody can tell me in short if i can shrink my Raid 6 Array (16x4Tb) on my Areca 1882-24 4Gb by 6 disks, and if how?

space wise i do not need the 6 disks at the moment since it is only about 20Tb full. capacity after removal of 6 Disks would be 32Tb out of 40...

Thanks!
 
PanaMax said:
Good day... does somebody can tell me in short if i can shrink my Raid 6 Array (16x4Tb) on my Areca 1882-24 4Gb by 6 disks, and if how?

space wise i do not need the 6 disks at the moment since it is only about 20Tb full. capacity after removal of 6 Disks would be 32Tb out of 40...

Thanks!
Click to expand...

You might be best recreating the array and restoring from a backup. Since the controller doesn't know about your file system, I can't see how it would know what parts of the array are in use vs not in use.
 
Anyone want to take a stab at this one before I return it?

Used Areca 1280 RevC. (not ML, has 24x SATA) 256Mb cache.

System 1 - Asus H97I-Plus. It's a mITX board with a single PCI-E x16 3.0 slot. System hangs with card inserted. Remove card and system boots normally.

System 2 - Gigabyte 970A-UD3. System boots. Tried it in both PCI-E x16 slots. Disable fast boot, disabled onboard sata, etc.Never got the initialization screen.. Tried a 128gb SSD (with os) and a blank 320GB Sata drive. Still nothing. ATI 5450 worked in both slots. (I installed an OS on one a drive connected to the onboard sata port and don't see anything in device manager nor could I see a drive connected to it)

System 3 - Supermicro H8DME-2. This system has PCI-E x8 slots. Tried both. System wouldn't post with card in either slot.

System 4 - Asus Maximum VII Hero. Tried in both x16 slot and x1 slot. System wouldn't post in either.
 
Hi everyone, I'm having some problems with my ARECA 1882ix-12 card after wiping my drive and trying to create a new raid array.

Recently I had one of my drives fail and so I decided to back everything up and try again.

What I'm seeing now though are insanely bad write speeds and I've tried a few times with Raid 10, 0 and 3 and after creating the volume the read/write speeds keep showing up like this (currently this is a raid 10 setup with 12x3TB drives:

RDNEYOV.jpg


Everything looks to be setup the way I had it running before. I was always able to get speeds around 1000MB/S for the top row and normal speeds for the other categories.

Anyone know what might be going on here?
 
Areca added a firmware level speed test in the latest firmware. Do you get similar results there?
 
Is the array still building or degraded? What do you mean by "try again"? Did you create a new volume set? A new drive? A new Windows volume? All of the above? Which drives are you using? What's the stripe size?
 
Blue Fox said:
Areca added a firmware level speed test in the latest firmware. Do you get similar results there?
Click to expand...

No, I haven't tried this setting yet. I'll see if I have the latest firmware.

mikeblas said:
Is the array still building or degraded? What do you mean by "try again"? Did you create a new volume set? A new drive? A new Windows volume? All of the above? Which drives are you using? What's the stripe size?
Click to expand...

I tried by deleting and creating the new volume sets.

Right now I'm letting it initialize but I got these results after selecting 'no initialization' or something like that during the setup. The drives aren't ideal (seagate 3tb barracuda's) but they worked for at least a year now without issue. The next thing when I can afford it is getting proper enterprise drives or a better recommendation from here.

Stripe size is 64kb
 
it just finished initializing and I'm still getting horrible write results using crystaldiskmark 1200MB/s Read, 23MB/s write.

I'm not sure what I should try next. Any advice would be appreciated.
 
I'm not sure what I did to fix it but I shut everything down and unplugged the battery. Booted it up again and now I'm getting these results. Although its not consistent. Some passes show a read speed of 600mb/s so something odd is still going on.

Again these are now setup in RAID 10, there are 12x3TB Seagate Barracuda drives. I'm using this drive primarily for video editing in Premiere CC. I'm mostly editing 4K and 5K video footage so I'm trying to find the ideal setup for both redundancy and speed.

I was running a RAID 3 setup before, I had a drive fail so since the rebuild was so slow, I thought I'd just back everything up and try something different. Not sure right now if I should just stick RAID 3 or not, I've read so many mixed reviews online.

Here are all the screen shots with my current settings, any suggestions on where I can tweak for optimal performance?

iI0KZcM.jpg


4KXXqbv.jpg

1vH3fJU.jpg

RiNi6oN.jpg

erni5Ps.jpg

L3TTB06.jpg

7aG7qMB.jpg
 
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Still can't get my ARC-1883i working. I've tried in 3 different boards, two different manufacturers. I've tried communicating with Areca support and they've been unhelpful, or I guess as helpful as they choose to be.

The problem is my current ARC-1220 works just fine. Areca's saying that the manufacturer might not allow anything but graphics to be on the PCIe slot. The worst thing is now I'm past my return window.
This is the first "incompatibility" that I've ever had with any hardware combination. Pretty darn frustrating.
 
WangChung said:
Still can't get my ARC-1883i working. I've tried in 3 different boards, two different manufacturers. I've tried communicating with Areca support and they've been unhelpful, or I guess as helpful as they choose to be.

The problem is my current ARC-1220 works just fine. Areca's saying that the manufacturer might not allow anything but graphics to be on the PCIe slot. The worst thing is now I'm past my return window.
This is the first "incompatibility" that I've ever had with any hardware combination. Pretty darn frustrating.
Click to expand...

Wang-
As I mentioned a few pages back, it is likely that card just wont work with your motherboard. You can either upgrade to a known-working motherboard or sell the card.
 
WangChung said:
Still can't get my ARC-1883i working. I've tried in 3 different boards, two different manufacturers. I've tried communicating with Areca support and they've been unhelpful, or I guess as helpful as they choose to be.

The problem is my current ARC-1220 works just fine. Areca's saying that the manufacturer might not allow anything but graphics to be on the PCIe slot. The worst thing is now I'm past my return window.
This is the first "incompatibility" that I've ever had with any hardware combination. Pretty darn frustrating.
Click to expand...

I have found areca to usually have very good compatibility with motherboards where they would work in boards that otherwise would not take a hardware raid controller. If a 1220 works in a board where an 1883 doesn't and you can't get it working in any other boards then maybe you have a defective ARC-1883? I used some ARC-1883x's in my supermicro boards and didn't have a single issue.
 


For the love of god does anyone have a clue how I'm getting such shit results with my 1882??

I just tried everything again from scratch.

This is 12x 3tb drives in RAID 0!!
 
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TinoD said:
For the love of god does anyone have a clue how I'm getting such shit results with my 1882??

I just tried everything again from scratch.

This is 12x 3tb drives in RAID 0!!
Click to expand...

Try to Enable/Disable NCQ on the Areca card!
I had some problems with this option when I was playing with SSD & HDD on the same card.
 
I'm waiting for an 1882ix to arrive. It may take some time due to various issues, but in the meantime I thought I would use a 1280 instead. However, is it possible to simply move a raid array from a 1280ml to an 1882ix? A good friend of mine (who used Arecas for years) said that you can transfer from a 1680ix to a faster controller (I guess 1880ix/1882ix/1883ix is what he meant), so I'm wondering if the same thing applies to other models as well.
 
Depends on how the array was created as far as I remember. If you created it and selected the option for a maximum of 16 volume support as opposed to 128, I think it should.
 
Hi all,

I have been running a ARC-1680 card for a while now. I decided to move over some Samsung 840 EVO over and notice that the current SATA Mode is at SATA150. Is there a way to set this higher?
 
Hey everyone,

I have a 1280ML with five drives configured in a RAID-6. One of the drives has started failing (read timeouts) and instead of the controller failing the drive and running degraded, it's just blocking I/O to the entire RAID! I've tried "disk fail drv=9" in the CLI (I've triple-checked that it is the 9th channel) but I get "GuiErrMsg<0x47>: Invalid Parameter." as the response. Do I have to offline the volume set or something for this to work? The controller is currently "Checking" the volume set and is quickly accumulating 1500+ errors...any help would be appreciated!
 
Finally I got my two 1882ix's. Now, here's some memory info for ya:

Kingston KHX13C9B1/4R 9905403-447.A00LF was installed on one card and seems to work. 4GB stick.

2nd card got this: Hynix 4GB 1Rx8 PC3-14900E-13-12-D1 HMT451U7AFR8C-RD TA AD 1337 (yes, 1337 :) ). Appears to work as well.

At least both say 4096MB system memory in the Areca BIOS.
 
Swapped the wtock cooler for a pair of VF700-Cu's - images here, as I can't see any attachment options on this forum (???): http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=131388

I'm guessing it would be safer to just get the dremel out of the closet and cut a few mm off of the fin-base on the left cooler to avoid contact with the memory stick, but oh well... the only question that remains for me is if I should cool the "middle chips" that have thermal pads. With a tiny bit of airflow like they will get now they should be fine, no? 28W TDP :)
 
Is that even a question? The stock cooler doesn't shine if you want reasonable temps and silence in a regular desktop setup. It was sort of loud on my bench desk, even... I'm guessing the fan would spin up even further if it was 30-40C hotter, stuck between a pair of GPUs in my daily driver.
 
I created a Zabbix template for Areca RAID controllers, the following items are monitored:
- CPU Temperature
- Controller Temperature
- RAID Set Status
- Volume Status
- HDD Status
- Battery Level

Template in XML format can be found here:
http://pastebin.com/PtzrPDzw

Successfully tested on Areca ARC-1680ix-16
 
Does anyone know If 6TB drives will work on a Areca 1261ML?

I would like to install a few HGST Ultrastar HE6 HUS726060ALA640 drives on it.
 
Even the older SATA cards like the 1261ML had 2TB+ support so those drives should work.
 
Ok, thanks Blue Fox. :)
They are still expensive so I want to be sure :p
Maybe I try with 1 first.
 
Fred. said:
Does anyone know If 6TB drives will work on a Areca 1261ML?

I would like to install a few HGST Ultrastar HE6 HUS726060ALA640 drives on it.
Click to expand...

They work on the 1231ML, so I would expect them to work on the 1261 as well.
 
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