areca ARC-1680IX-24 PCIe x8 SAS RAID Card

Pros: Not sure at this point.

Cons: Bought this controller and 24 2tb drives to use as a storage chassis to hold data until it could be written to tape. Controller crashes the machine upon mount of any virtual drive larger than 16tb even with 64bit LBA mode selected. Have been trying for a week to get all 24 drives in a raid 6 which causes the controller web interface to lockup and reboot. Areca has been emailing back and forth to resolve the issue. They recommended using their thunderbolt driver which has now caused the server to fail to boot. So after reloading the server (Server 2012) and trying the thunderbolt driver a second time has caused the same results, this time without any configuration and no drives physically attached.

Other Thoughts: Go with LSI, their interface may not be as nice but it gets the job done and is cheaper. This was not worth the man hours put into this raid card.

Pros: Nice card lots of options. Web interface is nice.

Cons: No support. No server 2012 drivers. Every machine we put this card in blue screens as soon as you try to access a volume on the raid card. If you delete the raid volume or remove the card it's fine. Doesn't happen with the Lsi card which uses the same processor.

Other Thoughts: Go with Lsi. Would be an awesome card if it worked.

Pros: - Very good performer when it works.
- Much connectivity (internal and external)
- Web interface

Cons: - Support is virtually non-existent. You get somebody e-mailing you in very bad English telling you the problem is not with them. Then they e-mail you an updated driver that's nowhere to be found on their site yet which makes it slightly better. When you let them know you have the same problem (same bug) but less frequent now they tell you they'll let their engineers know and you don't ever hear from them.
- Support for Solaris is just plain bad. The stock drivers crash the machine.
- Controllers hang when using the web interface or when pulling out more than one disk (hot-swap) at a time requiring a reboot.
- No overview of cache or cpu usage.
- One of our drives was bad but it won't let you know - the controller keeps retrying
- It seems to ignore fsync's - it doesn't flush the caches.
- Under very high load, it will perform very badly.

Other Thoughts: I've tried and tried with these controllers. I have two of them now but I'll be investing in a cheaper LSI, Promise or Adaptec.

Pros: Insanely fast! 10 * 7200.11 750GB in Raid 6. First 2TB Avg Read = 720MB/s - Burst 1250 MB/s - Seek 9.7ms.

I have migrated my raid from one of the ARC-1220 cards, just plug and play. I was originally running 8x300GB drives.

Easy to use once you know what the terms mean.

Cons: Documentation is a little weak; hard to find exactly which memory will work (mine originally came with 512mb).

Pros: To correct the last comment: This controller DOES support booting. You have to update to the latest firmware (keep in mind there are multiple versions of 1.45....80915 is the latest). I have booted off multiple drives and multiple array types. Each firmware update improves behavior and performance and makes more drives compatible.

Cons: SATA STR is lower than what many people will expect due to SAS overhead.

Other Thoughts: Strength of this controller is in random access patterns and improved parity calculation efficiency.

Pros: Very fast. Tons of features. This is almost like installing a SAN - it can do anything you are likely to want to do. I installed the battery backed cache option plus the 2gb memory upgrade to get the best performance. I have it installed in a skulltrail system in one of the 16x slots on the motherboard.

Cons: After much frustration, I have finally figured out that this card (and perhaps other Areca cards) cannot support boot devices with Vista64. It seems even though they supply Vista64 drivers, they don't actually support booting. Apparently they USED to, but when service pack 1 of Vista64 came out, it broke the drivers. Since Areca still doesn't have this fixed, I would make sure you understand you will not be able to boot from drives attached to this controller if you are using Vista64.

Other Thoughts: I used a pair of Velociraptors setup as Raid1 on build in Intel raid controller on my Skulltrail system. They I used this controller for 3 separate arrays of 14 1TB Seagate es2 drives. Array 1 is a pair in Raid 1, and Arrays 2 and 3 are both Raid 5 using 6 drives each (5gb usable space on each array). I also have a hot spare configured which the controller can use.

Works like a charm if you don't need it to boot with Vista64.

Pros: Incredibly fast thanks to the IOP348 processor. Runs much cooler than the Adaptec 5 series based on the same processor (Mine idles at 47 celsius). No artificial 16 drive limit in an R6 array like the Adaptec 24 port card has.

Cons: Incompatible with a wide range of SATA drives thanks to the IOP348 processor (Seagate AS, Samsung). The HDD compatibility list from Areca is incorrect, and contradicts my own experiences, as well as multiple emails from Areca support. Contact them directly before planning a system based off SATA disks.

Other Thoughts: I can't comment on SAS compatibility. Once updated to the latest BETA firmware, it IS compatible with WD SATA hdd's. I'm now using with with an array of WD1001FALS (after returning the Seagate 1TB AS' I initially purchased), and after updating the firmware it's been solid. I haven't tested it with the new 1.5TB drives from Seagate, but considering they are also the AS series consumer drive model I'd make sure the store had a good return policy before trying it. Despite it's compatibility issues I gave it a 4 because of the great support Areca provides, and because it's so dang fast.