areca RMA tale

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
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tl;dr version: RMA sucked, not buying areca again

At some point I had bought two ARC-1220 controllers from Newegg.
I didn't install them immediately, and when I did I found that one of those controllers was DOA.

I contacted areca for support/RMA, they told me that all their RMA goes through the distributor (not vendor!) the controller was sold by. I contacted Newegg, they told me that more than 30 days had passed and they don't do exchanges, I need to contact the manufacturer. (LOL)

So I wrote Newegg back, explaining (again!) that areca told me to tell Newegg that RMA is through the distributor and that I need that info from Newegg. After two days Newegg got back to me telling me Tekram USA is the distributor and they will do the RMA.

I contacted Tekram, after some not unusual back and forth I obtained an RMA number and shipped the unit FedEx Next Day Air to Tekram.

5 weeks later I do not have my replacement controller.

I contacted Tekram and just the day before yesterday they shipped a replacement card to me.

Tekram RMA Dept. - Nov. 6 said:
Regarding your card status, the card has send to Taiwan manufacturer to repair. we will replace one card to you and send to you tomorrow. when get the tracking # will let you know.
Click to expand...

Had I not asked what happened to my card, who knows whether I would have seen a replacement this year.

Sure, I am not a power user who purchases dozens of controllers each year, but between this truly bizarre and disappointing RMA experience, and between areca controllers not being natively supported in ESX, I am done buying the areca brand.
 
Sorry to hear that. :(
I was going to buy an ARC-1222 card next week. May be I should go with Adaptec instead.
 
At least they've been pretty reliable from what I've seen. Tech support is why we passed on them at work for some workstations.
 
So I received the replacement controller by mail today, check out the packaging:







Do yourself a favor and stay far far away from this brand.
 
That certainly is disappointing. I'm not going to be getting rid of my card anytime soon though.
 
pissboy said:
Why did they print their postage from ebay?
Click to expand...

They didn't, it's just a thing USPS does now if you print postage online, it's an ebay ad.

Edit:
Actually, that comment prompted me to have a closer look at the shipping label:





So apparently whoever is running PrimeAve.com is also the US tech support (or at least RMA handler) for Tekram and areca.
 
nice, im just glad i moved to whs and ditched the controller market alltogether. i cant stand incompetent companies, much less having to worry about drive compatibility
 
Ockie said:
nice, im just glad i moved to whs and ditched the controller market alltogether. i cant stand incompetent companies, much less having to worry about drive compatibility
Click to expand...
so whs is better tahn server 2008? do u have any protection if a drive fails? is there a 64 bit version
 
Ockie said:
nice, im just glad i moved to whs and ditched the controller market alltogether. i cant stand incompetent companies, much less having to worry about drive compatibility
Click to expand...

Can you explain what you mean? I am confused.

Don't you still need a controller card so your MB can talk with your 16+ or 24+ drives in their hot swap cages?
 
He just uses SATA controllers like the SuperMicro PCI-X (not PCIe) ones with no RAID etc, just plain SATA.. Then uses WHS to make redundant the folders he deems important.
 
Well the RMA part kind of sucks but I am hoping their DOA rate isn't very high. I have been pushing the company I work for to use ARC-1222 controllers due to the fact that the silmech supermicro servers we have (2u/8x1TB) have been having tons of issues due to the crappy as hell 3ware controller.

In raid6 the burst speed is good for writing 1 or 2GB of data but I tried writing 0'z to an entire array and after a day it wasn't done and the average speed had dropped to 35 Mb/sec (I mean really?) Not only that but even raid10 is dog slow on these 3wares. We decided to switch to raid10 due to performance issues with raid6 but it didn't help very much. Not to mention the 3wares seem to think its cool not to set the array to degraded and drop a drive when it sees a drive getting tons of corruption issues/bad sectors.

Unfortunately a fsck was ran when one of the drives was fux0rd and this caused FS corruption. Luckily 99% of the data was recovered but still pretty lame that it happened in the first place. It is raid6 so it should have just kicked the drive out of the array IMHO. Also another one got some error when syncing cache and on reboot it no longer could see the array at all. The disk configuration block or some crap was corrupt. Sadly enough 3ware has no option to re-create the array with no init (like areca).

We have been tryeing out some LSI cards too but there performance has sadly been worse than 3ware in reads and a bit better on writes. I believe the arc-1222 will surpass them while running in raid6 like we originally planned which will mean each sever will gain another 50% of space (2TB). If that is the case then we might be ordering a good 100 of those ARC-1222 cards. I guess I will see what the DOA rate is on them if we do switch.
 
matrix563 said:
so whs is better tahn server 2008? do u have any protection if a drive fails? is there a 64 bit version
Click to expand...

WHS is more niche than 2008. It would depend on your application for me to detirmine 2008 superiority, but for home and personal file sharing, WHS hands down.

Pocatello said:
Can you explain what you mean? I am confused.

Don't you still need a controller card so your MB can talk with your 16+ or 24+ drives in their hot swap cages?
Click to expand...

You can use any controller in any configuration. You don't have to worry about raid chipsets not talking with your drives.
 
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