New Areca cards

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Blue Fox

[H]F Junkie
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Jun 9, 2004
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Apparently Areca has released new 8, 12, 16, and 24 port SAS cards recently and I can't find any info on them apart from the specs and pictures listed on the official website (http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcietosas1680series.htm). Going by the specs, performance will be incredible on these things...1.2ghz processor and support for 4gb DIMMs, not to mention 4 external ports on top of the internal ones. Anyone have any idea on pricing/availability of these things? I would like to get my hands on the 1680ix-24 if pricing isn't too much higher than the 1280ML. Also, what exactly is the purpose of the RJ11 jack on the back of the card?
 
The network jack is so the card hooks up to the network and you can use it to send out alerts and stuff when you configure it to a mail server. Pretty useful. Those new cards i guess perform poorly on SATA cards because the firmware emulates the interface or something like that. I emailed Areca about the cards to see if they would be good for SSD drives that are SATA interface and he recommended the 341 IOP Cpu's over the newer 348 ones. No clue on pricing for these.
 
oplin said:
The network jack is so the card hooks up to the network and you can use it to send out alerts and stuff when you configure it to a mail server. Pretty useful. Those new cards i guess perform poorly on SATA cards because the firmware emulates the interface or something like that. I emailed Areca about the cards to see if they would be good for SSD drives that are SATA interface and he recommended the 341 IOP Cpu's over the newer 348 ones. No clue on pricing for these.
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There is an ethernet port along with the RJ11 port. I have an Areca card already, so I've been using the ethernet port for sending alerts to my cell phone. Still haven't figured out what the RJ11 jack is for though. The manual is very vague about it and only mentions it once.
 
Huh, try emailing Areca, they're pretty good and quick about emails. The info they supplied me was way above what i thought they would. You know how these compare to the Perc5/i and Perc6/i cards on dell servers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJ11,_RJ14,_RJ25

No clue why they would include a jack like.
 
The reply i got back from Areca support.

and regarding the bandwidth, i will suggest you use three IOP341 controller
to met your customer's requirement.
these two processor have same bandwidth around 1GB/s, but IOP348 don't have
good performance like IOP341 on SATA drives.

because IOP348 have an emulate firmware to be able to works with SATA
drives, and this emulate firmware can't provide optimized performance.
 
oplin said:
No clue why they would include a jack like.
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My guess is that it's access to a serial debug console for the RAID firmware. But I'm probably wrong because those types of things aren't typically populated on production versions of the boards...

Phone port so the NSA can buy a bunch of these for recording all your conversations directly to fault tolerant storage? :D
 
oplin said:
You know how these compare to the Perc5/i and Perc6/i cards on dell servers?
Click to expand...

I've never used the Areca cards myself. But some points between these models and the Areca.

Both the Perc5 and Perc6 use LSI SAS controllers that do not have any sort of SATA performance issues. (I'm actually surprised that some Areca cards have that limitation!) The Perc5 uses an IOP333 whereas the Perc6 has a single-chip SAS/SATA/XOR/IOP controller based around PowerPC architecture. Perc6 definitely has a higher theoretical throughput in RAID usage compared to the Perc5.
 
I tried both the perc6 and perc5 controlers and was not happy with either. They really didnt have the bandwidth compared to any of my areca cards they are just amazingly fast. Im not really sure why so many poeple get slow setups from areca. ive got a few 8 disk setups in raid 6 and my reads range between 500-600 average and burste is normally between 1150-1190mb/s depending on the controler some are 331 and some are 341 in my setup. The intel srcsas18e im using on a sas raid 0 setup blows the doors off the perc6. The intel card is picky dont get me wrong it has a sweet spot anything more or less and its slow.But if set right it does give a 170mb/s avearge read increase for me over perc6.
 
jrstang473 said:
The intel srcsas18e im using on a sas raid 0 setup blows the doors off the perc6.
Click to expand...

That's interesting... The SRCSAS18E is just a re-branded MegaRAID card, which is the same card that is also sold as the Dell PERC5... I'm surprised that a PERC5 would outperform a PERC6 just based on my knowledge of the architecture differences between the two. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I wonder if there may be some more optimizations that can be done on the PERC6 (sadly, not by the end-user, but by the firmware developers).
 
For those interested, the 1680ix-24 will be available on April 1st and will go for $1400. The 8, 12, and 16 port versions will be available on the 18th and run $800, $1000, and $1200 respectively. As much as I want the 1680ix-24, I'm having a hard time spending $1400 on a RAID card. Even having a hard time justifying the 1280ML for $1200. Oh well, still have a week to decide.
 
Well, at least one person on these forums has ordered one, so I believe so. They're probably hard to find though. None of the distributors I've found are shipping them, so they might be just sold out...hard to tell really.
 
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