Question 1

What do you use the RJ-45 port for?

Accepted Answer

The RJ-45 port is an ethernet network adapter built into the card.

It is used for Out-Of-Band management purposes, such as configuration of the card, drives, arrays, etc. from a computer on the network via browser, SNMP, Telnet.

Data on any drives connected to the card in the host computer is not accessible through the card's network port, only through the host computer's operating system.

After installation of the card in an appropriate PCI-Express slot in a computer, connect an ethernet cable to the card and hub/router/switch. Power up the computer and it will acquire a TCP/IP network address automatically (if DHCP is available on network), or you can enter the card's screen-based utility to set a manual IP address. When the card has a network IP address, its management functions are available from a computer on the network.

Software can be installed on the host computer to manage the card, but this is optional, as all management functions are available via the card's network management port using browser etc.

Question 2

Is this card compatible with UEFI motherboards?

Accepted Answer

Yes it is, I'm using it on a Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI mini-itx board right now.  Haven't had a bit of trouble with it, I am kind of impressed.  RAID 6 on 2TBx6 drives.  Initialized in about 4 hours, get consistent 112mb/s writes with no tweaking (i.e. stripe/block combos).  Let me know if I can answer any more ?'s

Question 3

Does this item come with the cables necessary to connect the controller card to up to 8 internal SATA III 2TB Hard drives?

Accepted Answer

Yes.  For future reference you can check out all the pictures of the controller on Newegg and in one of the pictures see the 2 fan-out cables along with the other contents of the box.

Question 4

Does this controller work well with SSDs?  I want to RAID 0 eight 1TB SAMSUNG.  Trying to get the most of sequential writes as possible.

Accepted Answer

Areca ARC-1224-8i is a 6GBs RAID controller card, is being replaced by 12GBs Areca ARC-1226-8i-MS (Newegg P/N: 16-151-237), dual core RAID on chip controller, 1GB cache and includes 2 x SFF8643 connectors, and 2 x SFF8643 (host/ RAID card) to 4 SATA fan out (target/ device end) cable.   or ARC-1883i-SA (Newegg P/N: 16-151-178), dual core RAID on chip controller, 2GB cache, and also includes 2 x SFF8643 to 4 SATA fan out cable.

Question 5

Does this card spin down JBOD's?

Accepted Answer

Russell in my particular setup i am using the card to run 6 4tb nas drives in JBOD mode on FreeNAS OS for 24/7 media server. All the drives appear as one logical unit under FreeNAS's ZFS raid 5 equivalent. when i check the drive status they all appear to be running concurrently. Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Questions & Answers