raid controller

A

ashman

Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2011
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I am looking at a used Areca ARC1280ML controller, its a 16 port model, I don't know much about it and can't seem to find much on the Areca website, does anyone have any experience with this card? I need to know it its supported in 64 bit windows OS's such as server 2008R2 or 2012, also if it will support larger then 2TB drives.

Thanks
 
Make sure that you verify that your drives will work with the raid card that you purchase. I expect most desktop drives to not work because of the lack of TLER.
 
drescherjm said:
Make sure that you verify that your drives will work with the raid card that you purchase. I expect most desktop drives to not work because of the lack of TLER.
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The SATA Areca cards were pretty good about drive compatibility actually. I ran a bunch of Seagate drives on mine back in the day.
 
Well I have 16 WD Green drives that I want to use with this card, I can't find anything in any documentation that mentions anything about drive support.
 
Personally I would only use Hitachi, Toshiba and Seagate hard drives with hardware RAID controllers. (I have had terrible experience with several WD20EARS green drives before). I wouldn't even bother with WD's RAID edition drives since they are way to expensive.

If you are planning to use WD's green drives, you may want to send an inquiry to Areca and ask about any potential compatibility issue. Areca is usually pretty good at answering email inquiries.. You don't have to tell them you are looking to buy a used Areca controller, just tell them you have an old ARC1280ML and you would like to know if the card has any known issues when used with WD's green drives.
 
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Green drives are the worst possible drives you could use with hardware RAID.

It might create just fine, but eventually in a few days to months you will be back to the forum asking how to recover your data from your bombed array.
 
I've heard this all before, yes I know, thank you, but I've been running 16 WD Green drives in two raid 5 arrays on two separate controllers without issues for over two years, maybe I am lucky, maybe not. I seller of the card I am getting says he has run Green drives on it without issue, so I should be fine, ultimately I will find out when I get it and install it, thanks for all your help.
 
The responses given have all been good and if you wish to use Greens, do so at own risk.

Why do I say this? We have seen loads of people before you with same ideas/opinions and they end up coming back with sob-stories.


Also sounds like you already had the answer to the thread from the seller and made your decision, hard to say when thread is old.
 
I would reckon that for as many sob stories there are out there from using greens, there are people like me who have no problems with them. Of course its always better to be safe then sorry, so better to not recommend them then experience failures. There are far more drive choices available now anyway, then when I put the greens into service, at the time, they were the cheapest per gigabyte available. If I were to do it again now, I'd probably spend the extra money and go with REDS since they are designed for prolonged use and come in sizes larger then 2TB.
 
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