Pros: Worked well for a while.

Cons: My Areca 1882-ix-24 just died. Still under warranty.

Areca wants 3 weeks to replace it! In what world is a 3 week turn-around for production grade server hardware acceptable?

They refuse to cross-ship or send a replacement.

Other Thoughts: $1300 for a commercial-grade RAID card to have someone refuse a rapid replacement is terrible.

Poor customer service is unacceptable when using hardware at this level.

Pros: FAST
consistant. from a 6d raid 5 to a different 5d raid 5 both 5400rpm drives it can copy at 500-700MB/s for sustained 9TB of large files.

Cons: if you run a rebuild or initialization and use 100% utilization, the volume will not be available till it is finished.
windows 7 software support is almost non existent but again you'd have to be a Tech junkie to even want to spend this kind of money on a raid card.

Other Thoughts: I can port in and use the bios boot options but when I try to use the ARCHTTP program it can never find my device.
It might become an issue in the future.

Pros: Card is excellent but requires some skill to setup. I would not recommend this card unless you have (or access to) the professional knowledge to setup this fine piece of hardware.

Easy to install, setup and update.

Cons: Cables that come with it are stiff and may need slight adjustments. I had a connection issue were the cable did not fit the SAS backplane snugly that required I hot glue the the cable in place.

-Cooling system is somewhat inadequate. Onboard CPU runs hotter than the CPU on my motherboard. (50c on boot compared to my mobo CPU 32c) That's hot for no load. Expect to adapt the cooling system if you want to prevent heat damage.

-Actual Raid setup documentation is lacking. You actually have to know what you're doing for the most part.

Other Thoughts: Documentation lists this card as PCI 2.0, however they just included outdated documentation. Version 3 of this card is PCI 3.0 compliant.

Card is very long and feels a little wobbly in the PCI slot. Wish it used the entire slot even if it was blank plastic. Definitely not something you want in a machine that must be moved often. But if you have those requirements, why are you toting a system around like this in the first place?

I updated the all the onboard software. This will be 4 firmware bin files that you submit from the same update location in the web interface. A little confusing at first, but you submit each one of them and it knows what to do automatically.

Pros: Seriously hardcore!
Purchased this and a norco rpc-4224 and populated the enclosure with 24 Seagate Constellation ES ST2000NM0001 2TB 7200 RPM drives in Raid 60. Absolutely epic this controller crushes anything i throw at it truly EPIC!
i have seen some benchmarking sites hit 4.7Gb/s read speeds with quality ssd's.

Cons: Wish it came with a BBU from the factory the only reason i mention this is honestly i cant find anything else about this controller that i could place in the con category, well maybe the price... best 1,500 i have ever spent.