areca ARC-1280ML-2G PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: Follow-up to my earlier review. This card has been running strong and stable since purchase. I love the flexibility with RAID sets and volumes this card offers. Also great email support from ARECA. They generally responded within 24 hrs for questions I had on extending volume size and setting up email event notifications. The card also supports delayed spin up of the hard drives, so you don't need to drop extra $ for an oversized power supply to support the inrush current. I currently have an 11 drive 1TB WD RE 3 setup and am getting 700 MB/s sequential read, 6.1 ms random access, and 1030.6 MB/s bursts reported from HD Tach. I am very pleased with the features, performance, and stability this card offers, and have been taken care of by ARECAs customer service. I highly recommend an ARECA product to anyone investing in a RAID controller.

Cons: See my previous review about drive drop out during addition of drives or hot swap. Again, I have not (and don't plan to) identified which component is causing this problem. It could be the card, the power supply, or the case. I suspect the case/backplane. Luckily the ARECA card has a suspend RAID feature that makes this a non-issue for me in the future.

Overall Review: The pictures on Newegg do not show the correct cables that come with the card. There are 6 each 1 x SFF-8087 (Min SAS 4i) to 4x SATA cables included. They are ~ 30" long. Two have 90 degree SFF-8087 connectors, the other four are straight. Since the Newegg pictures only showed SAS to SAS (SFF-8087 to SFF-8087) connectors I purchased the SAS to SATA connectors on another site. Fortunately I bought them shorter and they keep my case cleaner w/ better airflow, so I won't bother returning them. I should also note the SAS to SAS cables shown on the Newegg product photos were not included.

Pros: 24 SATA ports, boots w/ vista x64, raid 6, SATA300+NCQ, fast fast fast, 10 drive raid 6 is giving me 600+MB/s sequential reads.

Cons: I'm not sure if this is the cards fault, my cases fault, or the PS fault, but I just added anotehr drive and the two drives hooked up to the same channel in the array "failed". A restart showed the drives were fine, but I now have to rebuild the entire array. I'm on hour #1 of expected 7 hrs here. I won't take off an egg, since I don't know what component is at fault. Thank ala only two drives dropped and I was using RAID 6 for all volumes, because I've already migrated alot of data.

Overall Review: Very long boot times (15-20 mins) due to card firmware initialization. I am using the max spin up stagger (6 s), but I don't see how that's translating into 20 mins for 10 drives. Overall I'm very happy, I'll just use the suspend array feature when adding new drives in the future to avoid the drop out problem.

Pros: This card is fantastic. I have been running one for over 3 years without issue and just bought a second. Has a great command line tool for managing, as well as a pre-OS utility, in addition to a web based tool. It supports 3TB drives after a quick firmware flash.

Cons: Pricey, but worth it.

Pros: Well I have owned this card for well over a year now and I have never had any problems with it. It is very fast, as I can easily sustain 1.4 GB /sec. I have 4 500 GB drives in a raid 0, 10 WD 1TB drives in a raid 6, and 10 Samsung 1TB drives in a raid 6. The performance is nothing short of incredible. I highly recommend this raid card if you need a lot of storage capacity as well as fault tolerance and speed.

Cons: It is expensive but you get what you pay for.

Overall Review: I hope that Areca will make a 6Gb/sec raid card. I know as of now no regular hard drive can saturate that speed and I do know they make SAS cards that do handle that speed. Overall my experience has been great with this card, as I can hot swap hard drives in and out all the time without any data loss or any problems with stability.

Pros: This card is extremely fast and I have never had any issues with it. I have owned this card now for 1.5 years now and never once had any issues. The web interface to the card works well and allows me to configure my drives. I highly recommend you buy the battery backup as well.

Cons: None, this card does what it promises. I would not hesitate to buy another one.

Pros: Fast, Cool, Loaded with features, and more importantly ROCK SOLID.

Cons: None, Try paying one of the big guys for a RAID controller like this for only 1k. They would laugh at you.

Overall Review: Been running two of these in two seperate storage servers for over 18 months now. Each one if fully loaded with 24 - 1TB WD RE3 drives. NOT ONE ISSUE! Had one drive go bad about 6 months ago and the card notified me. All 48 Drives in two RAID 6 array's. It's just sweet!

Pros: SUPER FAST, Built my 18TB array in less than 8 hrs! 480+ MB/s transfer on HD Tune for the array!

Cons: Need to have a 10 egg rating system!

Overall Review: Wish I could have 10 of them! Do not hesitate to purchase this card! Comes with everything you need!

Pros: Easy to set up, easy to configure, and everything worked flawlessly under Windows 2008 Enterprise so far.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I was having trouble with highpoint so I bought one of these for a new server. In the mean time, I lost yet another highpoint card. I ordered a 2nd Areca to replace the highpoint cards. Enough is enough. Never buy highpoint. They haven't responded to emails and I wonder if they're still in business.