3ware to Areca, is it worth it?

[Sparkyy]

I am currently running two (2) 3ware cards in PCI-X, a 9500s - 12 port and a 9500s - 8 port. Lately I have been looking at Acreca and their 24 port SATA II card and I am trying to decide even though my mobo can only do 64-bit/66mhz for the PCI-X and the Areca is 64-bit/133mhz. Is it worth the upgrade? Granted I can sell off the 9500s - 12, 8 and 4 port boards that I currently own and it should help with the price.

Reason for doing this is that Areca looks to be a better board in terms of monitoring the drives and maintenance as well. Able to look up the SMART info etc and being I am going to move from SATA I to SATA II hard drives anyways. That and just able to take all the drives and go from using two boards down to one.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I don't like the idea of one huge card like that - it smells like a lot of eggs in one basket. If you've got that many disks, it doesn't make sense to me to put them all on one controller.

But the Areca will be faster, and if you're not terribly concerned with reliability of the controller (I wouldn't be, TBH) then it's a nice upgrade. I'd also buy a stick of whatever ram it takes and stick it in there.

How many drives are you running, and what kind? What case and so forth are you using?

 

[Sparkyy]

Currently running my drives in a RAID 5 array, if I went this route I could just get rid of the two RAID 5s I run now and run one RAID 5 or even RAID 6 and either gain an extra 232.5 gb or not notice any space loss. All my drives are in the original stacker case and it is going to be the 250 REs.

3ware has been solid and never had any issues with them, no array disappearing etc, amazing company. But I want to monitor my drives better and it looks like Areca can do that and I have heard, from here and other places, that Areca is a great RAID card company.