Price : Too low to display
Areca Technology Corporation ARC-1210 4 Port Serial ATA ll RAID Controller ARC1210 Hard Drive & RAID Controllers
This review is from : ARC-1210 4 Port Serial ATA ll RAID Controller
Fast RAID controller . I am a Linux user who had been running software mirroring with a couple Western Digital 1TB Black Edition drives and had been having frequent problems with drives dropping out of the RAID when using the SATA ports built into my motherboard. I've read some reviews about Areca a couple of years ago and finally decided to bite the bullet since this card was within my budget.
I installed the RAID controller and hooked up a couple of spare WD 1TB drives I had. At first I could not get into the BIOS to configure the RAID controller, but I was able to use the CLI tool on my 64-bit OpenSUSE 11.3 install. After creating a couple of volumes I went into Linux and partitioned them. I then started restoring everything onto a mirrored array after formatting my main partition as XFS. The first thing I noticed was how much faster it was than software RAID. I was quite pleased.
I then decided I might as well migrate to RAID 5 and so I added the other two drives to the array, setting one up as a spare. It took forever, but the card seamlessly converted everything to RAID 5 and I extended my main RAID volume. I then went to grow my filesystem and realized my mistake with using the Linux LVM on top of it. LVM would not grow the volume (not Areca's fault) so I went back and partitioned it without LVM and restored my data from backup. If I hadn't of used LVM this would have been painless. I also tuned the XFS filesystem to the RAID stripe size and number of drives to further improve performance.
I later went and bought the battery option so I could use the write-back cache reliably and it screams.
The documentation could be a lot better and there are times where it's apparent it was translated to English. This is also apparent when using the web interface, which was easy to set up.
The CLI does crash when I try and look at the SMART results, though the web server has no problem (apparently the latest update fixes this). I contacted Areca a couple of times and they have always been helpful and responsive.
My other choice would have been 3Ware, but I bought an IDE RAID card from them years ago and had a lot of problems with it (though new versions are supposedly a lot better).
Linux had no problems seeing the card since the drivers are open source and included with the kernel distribution.
It would be nice if the card could display additional SMART information like I got from smartmon tools as well as having the web interface be able to display some statistics.
Some people have complained that the fan is loud on this card. I have no complaints as it seems rather quiet. Included is an alternate heatsink without a fan which I did not install.
Fast RAID controller . I am a Linux user who had been running software mirroring with a couple Western Digital 1TB Black Edition drives and had been having frequent problems with drives dropping out of the RAID when using the SATA ports built into my motherboard. I've read some reviews about Areca a couple of years ago and finally decided to bite the bullet since this card was within my budget.
I installed the RAID controller and hooked up a couple of spare WD 1TB drives I had. At first I could not get into the BIOS to configure the RAID controller, but I was able to use the CLI tool on my 64-bit OpenSUSE 11.3 install. After creating a couple of volumes I went into Linux and partitioned them. I then started restoring everything onto a mirrored array after formatting my main partition as XFS. The first thing I noticed was how much faster it was than software RAID. I was quite pleased.
I then decided I might as well migrate to RAID 5 and so I added the other two drives to the array, setting one up as a spare. It took forever, but the card seamlessly converted everything to RAID 5 and I extended my main RAID volume. I then went to grow my filesystem and realized my mistake with using the Linux LVM on top of it. LVM would not grow the volume (not Areca's fault) so I went back and partitioned it without LVM and restored my data from backup. If I hadn't of used LVM this would have been painless. I also tuned the XFS filesystem to the RAID stripe size and number of drives to further improve performance.
I later went and bought the battery option so I could use the write-back cache reliably and it screams.
The documentation could be a lot better and there are times where it's apparent it was translated to English. This is also apparent when using the web interface, which was easy to set up.
The CLI does crash when I try and look at the SMART results, though the web server has no problem (apparently the latest update fixes this). I contacted Areca a couple of times and they have always been helpful and responsive.
My other choice would have been 3Ware, but I bought an IDE RAID card from them years ago and had a lot of problems with it (though new versions are supposedly a lot better).
Linux had no problems seeing the card since the drivers are open source and included with the kernel distribution.
It would be nice if the card could display additional SMART information like I got from smartmon tools as well as having the web interface be able to display some statistics.
Some people have complained that the fan is loud on this card. I have no complaints as it seems rather quiet. Included is an alternate heatsink without a fan which I did not install.
ARC-1210 4 Port Serial ATA ll RAID Controller Reviews
Worth Every Dime . Was not sure if I really need a HW RAID card. I toyed around with the idea for several months and then my onboard raid controller failed. The clean up took forever and was an experience I never wanted to repeat. I am a budget spender, which is not really a good thing for computers, but this device has ran smoothly for over year. I have transferred this card from 4 different computers and 3 different OS and the data has been available without an issue from the card. My only complaint is the beeping. You cannot turn it off. You can turn off the alarm beeping, but not the system beeping. Win 7 does not work with this card right out of the box. ESXi also needs some tweaking. XP/XP64/2003/2003 64 all work with this. Also, UBUNTU!
Worth Every Dime . Was not sure if I really need a HW RAID card. I toyed around with the idea for several months and then my onboard raid controller failed. The clean up took forever and was an experience I never wanted to repeat. I am a budget spender, which is not really a good thing for computers, but this device has ran smoothly for over year. I have transferred this card from 4 different computers and 3 different OS and the data has been available without an issue from the card. My only complaint is the beeping. You cannot turn it off. You can turn off the alarm beeping, but not the system beeping. Win 7 does not work with this card right out of the box. ESXi also needs some tweaking. XP/XP64/2003/2003 64 all work with this. Also, UBUNTU!
Cons Review
Support is only email with Taiwan . Be advised that if you need support it is email only from Taiwan.
The person you deal with rarely understands the issue and has only one sentence responses often not relates to your problem.
The person you deal with rarely understands the issue and has only one sentence responses often not relates to your problem.
Feature ARC-1210 4 Port Serial ATA ll RAID Controller
- Ports: 4 internal via SATA
- RAID: 0,1, 1E, 3, 5, JBOD
- Processor: (Intel IOP 332)
- Cache: 256MB
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Product Details
EAN : 4712774410201MPN : ARC-1210
Brand : Areca
Weight : 2 pounds
Height : 4 inches
Length : 10 inches
Width : 7 inches
Binding : Personal Computers
Department : SATA Controllers
Manufacturer : Areca Technology Corporation
Model : ARC-1210
Platform : Netware
Publisher : Areca Technology Corporation
SKU : 1077009
Studio : Areca Technology Corporation
Where To Buy
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