Areca ARC-1231ML - Anyone have experience with this controller?

[Savage1701]

Wondering if anyone has experience with the Areca ARC-1231ML controller.

I am thinking about picking up one on the cheap on Ebay to try out Areca.

If so, what sort of benchmarks are you getting? Any quirks? Anything anyone really likes or dislikes about this controller? What cache size are you using?

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[rodrigue10]

I just purchased one from ebay. While I don't have much conclusive benchmark data to give you I can tell you that adding this card to your PC will increase your Boot time by at least 60 seconds. Another 30s if an array is not done initializing.. So far this is the only thing that has annoyed me. I understand that these cards are generally not for an everyday computer like I'm using it for and if used in a server this point becomes pretty insignificant.

I made a RAID 0 setup and was able to make a sustained write from a SSD of about 256 MB/s

I am also making a RAID 10 array with 4- 2TB drives. (Total space of 4TB after it's done) ..currently at ~30% done initializing after 5 hours.

Areca's website is pretty good...it took a little while to find the manual and some of the supporting information to allow me to login to the card over the web interface. I would say that it is not too clunky and seems to make sense. The manual will help a lot in understanding the capabilities.

The card I bought had the backup battery and 2GB stick of RAM.

One of the main reasons that I liked this card was the good reviews and the fact that it has provisions for allowing the HDD hooked up to go into a powersave/slower rpm/sleep state. This save on your drives always spinning at max rpm when the power is applied.

I will end this post with the fact that I'm not an expert in RAID and I was in the same boat as you...looking to get into hardware RAID setup and after much research found
this card to have the best features for the amount of $ spent.

I hope that gives you some food for thought. Good luck in your decision.

 

[Savage1701]

Wow, thanks. That certainly answers about all of my questions. I'm used to increased boot time due to RAID cards, so no big deal to me there, either.

Appreciate the write speed info. I would primarily be using it for heavy sustained writes of A/V files.

If it's convenient, where on Areca's support site did you find the specific drivers, firmware, etc.? I poked around and could not find that specific model, but then I was not going to actually do an install either.

Again, thanks for the comments. They are appreciated. Good luck with your arrays.

 

[rodrigue10]

Look carefully in the downloads section for mentions to discontinued products. The list is a little hard to read but there is a section for Drivers, Firmware, and Manuals. I believe the links for the discontinued information are FTP sites. I didn't need a special ftp client to access the files...but just a heads up.

There is no specific file that states it's for the 1231ML ... you just have to download a few and take a good look at the actual PDF Files to make sure it covers the model.

This should be the link to their main support page:
http://www.areca.com.tw/support/main.htm

 

[Savage1701]

Thanks. I appreciate your help. Looking forward to trying one of these out.