Pros: Hardware RAID, 128 MB ram for write back operation, passive heat-sink.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: I have had this card for 4 years now and it is still performing quite well. It only supports SATA 2, but that is to be expected due to its age.

While the board supports write back, the system running the card should at least have a UPS. Although the card has a connector for battery backup, I don't think Areca offers one.

This card has been in two systems - first was an HP m8330f workstation as Raid 0, and now in a server as Raid 1 for Hyper-V VM boot disks.

The HTTP proxy software available is very helpful in monitoring the card and making changes. It also makes it very easy to update the firmware and BIOS.

Pros: UI is good.

Cons: Resume from sleep fails. Support is not so great.

Other Thoughts: I tried this in two different computers, a Dell Inspiron 530 and Dell Studio XPS 435MT with Win7 64-bit. These use different chipsets, though the BIOS is similar.

In both cases, on resume from sleep the system would seem to be okay, but then lock-up dead on the first disk access. This was a showstopper for me, since sleep/resume was an important feature for me.

There was an event in the event log which I reported to support, but they were not helpful. Changing the BIOS to S1 sleep instead of S3 made it work, but S1 keeps the fans on. The BIOS didn't have S2 sleep. I also did all the usual things like making sure it was a clean install, updating firmware, BIOS, different model hard drives, disabling hybrid sleep, etc.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to try the card until the refund period was over, so I couldn't return it. Ultimately, I went back to Intel RST after figuring out the cause for the verification errors it was giving me.

Pros: Boots RAID1 for two 2.5 sata drives on Intel DN 2800MT with Windows 7. Good documentation. Fine product Low price.

Cons: None that I found.

Pros: I read a few reviews here complaining about the buzzer on boot. I have used a dozen of these in the past 2 years to provide 10 and less user workgroups a place to host their files. The buzzer is designed to notify a small business owner when their is a fault (bad drive, etc). Without the buzzer few business owners would know when their raid degraded. Yes with RAID cards you can setup email notifications, etc but nothing beats a beep. A simple beep that will work, email notifications can be haphazard and may not be noticed by the recipient. The buzzer beeps on every boot so the tech, user or small business owner knows the buzzer is still operational and has not lost its function. The users that are bothered by this beep on boot just need to buy another card. As an IT professional I feel a lot better for the systems that I have these in, that are often stored in a corner and only seen once a year, knowing that anyone in an earshot will know where a problem with the RAID and notifies us.

Cons: none as of yet but sure that they exist see other reviews.

Pros: As others have said, this is a great little 2-port RAID card for the price. In fact, Newegg often has open-box of this item, saving you more money! You *can* boot in degraded RAID mode, however to do so you must enable the option in the RAID BIOS menu. Also you probably want to disable the alarm if a drive has failed and you are waiting on a replacement. Works great in Windows Server 2008 R2 with the storport driver.

Cons: Only 1x PCIe, and also only supports SATA 3Gbs. But for the price you can't have it all. Also wish it was a 4 port card...

Other Thoughts: Running with a pair of WD 1TB RE4 hard drives. Initialization took a couple hours, but it does a complete surface test. In my case I'm glad it did because I had a defective drive right off the bat which I had to RMA!

Pros: Worked like a charm. Needless to say, only time will tell. I did however test by disconnecting a drive and a rebuild was flawless.

Cons: RAID 1 needs initializing. Will take 1-2 hours depending on your size. I have used other RAID 1 solutions, and they usually do not need to be initialized. I do not know, but maybe a initialization at the beginning is a good thing for the RAID stack.

Other Thoughts: A previous reviewer stated that you can not boot with this card in critical status, but testing proofed different. My server 2008R2 booted fine with the RAID in critical mode.
Why do people state these facts when they do not know what they are doing. It seems that many people are happy with this controller/company, so I am sure this performs flawless.

Pros: I had to update my review because I finally got it working. I emailed Areca's customer support and I got response the following business day. They instructed me to download and install a VMWare driver listed on the website. I had to download VSphere CLI and installed the driver in a minute. Added my RAID as a new datastore and Voila! It showed up :)

Cons: When you download the driver the help file inside says: Areca RAID volumes can only be the data storages on ESXi 4.x." and not ESXi system disks. However in ESX 4 you can have Areca RAID drives both as system and datastore drives. This really isn't a con, cuz I plan to install ESXi on a separate drive anyways and I'll keep all my vmachines on the datastore

Other Thoughts: I hope after all this trouble my new ESXi server will fix me some breakfast in the morning.

Pros: Great hardware raid card. Lots of options for configuring raid. Loved the web based feature where you can manage your raid and update your firmware - you can do it even remotely. You can set it up to send email alerts.

Cons: ESXi 4 and 4.1 can't find this card. I don't know why. I read reviews here that people have no problem with this card in ESXi. I got this card with 1.48 firmware and even after the update to the latest 1.49, ESXi 4 still can't see this card.

Other Thoughts: For all small budget ESX builders this card should be cheaper, cause it only has 2 sata ports.
For those updating the firmware through the browser make sure you use Firefox and have your new firmware files placed in C:\, or you will get "http protocol error". Read your manual.

Pros: I am using this controller for my Dad's system after nvraid ate the array. Unlike all software raid I have seen in RAID1 sequential reads will read off both drives. Using two 1.5 TB seagate drives in RAID-1 I saw 182 MB/sec reads (card bottleneck) and 90 megabyte/sec writes. Unlike most software/onboard RAID1 this card is giving near double the read performance as a stand-alone drive with redundancy.

This controller has the same interface/utility as the ARC-1220/1230/1260/1280 controller.

Cons: A little cheaper would be nice as its only a 2 port card.
PCI-E x1 (x4 would be nicer so it didn't bottleneck with fast drives/SSD)

Other Thoughts: Pro Tech didn't read the manual. If a drive is missing during start/died (while the array was not active) then the controller will not activate the raid set (degrading it) by default. You have to go into the setup and 'activate' the incomplete raid set (degrading it) to activate it. You can enable this so you don't have to do this in the future but this is a security feature so you don't degrade an array when moving chassis or something else and one of the drives isn't detected.

If a drive fails while the system is running then it should have already been degraded and shouldn't need to be activated.

I also have an ARC-1220,ARC-1280ML and ARC-1231ML I am using in other machines. At work we have over 500 ARC-1222's as well as 300 LSI based machines and 80 3ware. Areca by far makes the best controllers.

Pros: You can buy this card or the 3ware 9650se-2lp if your VMware server only has PCI-e 1x slots. This is my 1st Areca and so far I am very impressed.

ESXi 4.1
Gigabyte P35 chipset
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB drives in RAID 1

I bought an open box from Newegg and everything was included and the firmware was fully updated, so I lucked out.

Cons: Non yet.