ARC-1220 + 4 x Seagate 750's = Good Plan?

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unixadm

Gawd
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Jun 13, 2002
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I'm currently running a EVGA 680i AR revision board, EVGA 8800GTX, 4gb Patriot PC6400, C2D E6600 @ 3.2ghz, Silverstone TJ-09 case using a Silverstone modular 750watt PSU.

I've been pondering the idea lately of going with a true raid set up. I've worked the last 10 years as a Systems Administrator in various roles, so I have a great deal of experience with FC and SCSI raids. Right now I have a mis-match of drives in my system (2 x 250gb Seagate 7200.9s, 2 x 320gb Seagate 7200.10's, and a 400gb Seagate 7200.9).

I'd like to replace all of those with four Seagate 750gb 7200.10 drives running RAID5. The cards I'm looking at are the ARECA ARC-1210 or ARC-1220 8x PCI-E. My operating system is Vista Ultimate X64 and I noticed ARECA just came out with certified Vista drivers a week or so ago. My question is to anyone running a similar SATA raid setup, am I picking good components where it will yield good performance and reliability?

At work, most of our Sun servers run RAID1, and connect with 2-4gbps redundant fiber into a HDS SAN. So while I have a lot of enterprise experience, my desktop raid experience isn't quite there. My research shows Areca is a good brand, iffy support, but good reliability. Ewiz seems to have the best price on the card, and Fry's has the 750gb drives for $219 right now. I just got two 750's today and that got me thinking of doing it right, gaining some redundancy. I do back up my data with an LTO-3 tape drive on occasion, but I'd feel a lot better with something more than RAID0 or the slowness of RAID1 using the onboard controllers.
 
Good Plan - Expensive, but Good Plan.

But, I wouldn't use the RAID Array as my OS / Boot Drive.
Because if anything happens to the Array you wouldn't be able to boot the system to try to fix the problem.
 
Well I currently have the same problem since I'm running RAID0 between the two 320gb drives housing my OS. I have not had a hard disk failure at home in about five years, so I've been lucky. I usually swap equipment enough to keep things fresh. The cost is up there, but I started buying equipment back in the early 90's, so the prices today are dirt cheap. I figure this setup would stay with me for around three years, so over the long haul it has a useful return.

I bought two more 750gb Seagates. I'm most likely going to step it up over and above what I've listed here and buy the ARC-1231ML which is a newer raid card on the market. It's price point is up there. :)
 
I agree with rodsfree. Running your OS from the array will likely lead to poor performance. Putting the 320s in raid-1 and putting the OS there would be a good way to go.

Are you running Windows? That seems odd, given your name and all ;)
 
Alright. Perhaps I'll use the 320's in RAID1 or RAID0 on the Areca card and run the 750's in RAID5.

I have plenty of Solaris/Linux systems, but I run Vista on my desktop at home. It's a bit hard to game in the Linux enviornment. Plus I spend all my time working on enterprise servers, when I go home it's nice to have a GUI where I don't have to type for an hour. Do it for 10+ years for a living and it changes you a bit. :)

I'll screw around with it when I get it. I just bough the ARC-1231ML card. Can't wait to get everything.
 
unixadm said:
I have plenty of Solaris/Linux systems, but I run Vista on my desktop at home. It's a bit hard to game in the Linux enviornment. Plus I spend all my time working on enterprise servers, when I go home it's nice to have a GUI where I don't have to type for an hour. Do it for 10+ years for a living and it changes you a bit. :)
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Interesting - I have to work with Windows at work, and at home I use as much non-Windows stuff as I can. This summer I'm working with Solaris a lot, so I guess I'll see if that changes.
unixadm said:
I'll screw around with it when I get it. I just bough the ARC-1231ML card. Can't wait to get everything.
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Cool beans! Post your experiences if you get time; a lot of people ask about what they should buy and then disappear and we never get feedback on what they think of their setup a few months down the road.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Cool beans! Post your experiences if you get time; a lot of people ask about what they should buy and then disappear and we never get feedback on what they think of their setup a few months down the road.
Click to expand...

Second That!
 
I will follow up. Everything has been ordered and I expect to have the hardware in 5-7 business days. First I'm going to make a RAID5 array using the four 750gb drives and install my OS on that and see how it performs. That configuration will allow me to simply pull all the drives I have right now and revert should I run into problems. If everything works good enough for me, then I'll run it in that config since 2.1TB is PLENTY of storage for my desktop computer. If it seems slow, I'll install the two 320gb 7200.10's and run them in RAID0 and have close to 3TB. The ARC-1231ML card I'm getting has 12 ports, so capacity is not going to be a problem. I'm going to look for a 1 or 2gb DDR2 533 ECC DIMM to install in the card to increase the cache from 256mb. The issue is I only have six spots in my TJ-09 for drives in the lower cage.
 
Just following up. I received all four Seagate 750gb drives and the ARC-1231ML card today. I have a 1gb stick of Kingston DDR2 533mhz ECC Unbuffered memory showing up to upgrade the card from 256mb to 1gb of cache.

So far I've installed the card as a secondary device to my existing OS just to try it out. It's initializing the RAID5 array right now with a size of 2.25TB. The card is really nice, the Mini SAS connector with four serial ATA cables (slim) are also very nice. I have eight ports still available for future growth. The card has it all, monitoring, firmware web interface, ethernet port, etc. I can configure and check the card from anywhere on the 'net. At $859 it was not a cheap solution and I paid about $20-30 more than I could have, but bought it from the guys over on 2CPU forums because they have good support.

The only issue I found is it won't boot the ARC-1231ML firmware on my EVGA 680i if I install my Adaptec 29160LP SCSI card. I use that card to run my LTO-3 tape drive, so I'll have to see if I can work around it. The 680i boards are nice because they have two 16x PCI-E ports for GPUs and one 8x port for other devices or a 3rd video card.

I will advise once I start running some tests against the array. It should be interesting to see how my results compare tomorrow with those today when I ugprade to 1gb of cache. I figured 2gb was overkill and not worth the money.
 
unixadm said:
The only issue I found is it won't boot the ARC-1231ML firmware on my EVGA 680i if I install my Adaptec 29160LP SCSI card. I use that card to run my LTO-3 tape drive, so I'll have to see if I can work around it. The 680i boards are nice because they have two 16x PCI-E ports for GPUs and one 8x port for other devices or a 3rd video card.
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You might try switching slots. If the BIOS documents an ordering to the slots and you can put them in the other order, try it.
unixadm said:
I will advise once I start running some tests against the array. It should be interesting to see how my results compare tomorrow with those today when I ugprade to 1gb of cache. I figured 2gb was overkill and not worth the money.
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I'm looking forward to it :D
 
I'm going to try swapping the slots tonight. I can move the Areca card to the 16x GPU slot, and the PCI cards around. I'm also going to update the firmware on the Adaptec 29160LP since it has v2.57 and 3.10 is the current. I just got that card off of Ebay the other day, but it works fine without the Areca card in the system.

I didn't get much accomplished last night , but will keep working on it tonight. I'm tempted to buy two more 750gb drives and call it done for a couple of years. :)
 
I spent a bit more time working with the card. As an addition to my current Vista X64 OS and the drives on my desk with a 120mm fan blowing on them, everything worked good. However if I tried to have Vista boot off the array, I would get a BSOD. Turns out this problem is caused by having 4gb of memory and there is a update for Vista that resolves this issue. However you cannot resolve it during the installation process, so you need to reduce your memory to 1-2gb. After that the system booted fine and finished the install.

With RAID5 and a single 250gb LUN created to hold my OS, I'm seeing bursts of over 1000MB/Sec in HD Tach 32mb, and an average of about 235MB/Sec. While that's decent, it's not quite as good as I was hoping for. So I ordered up two more 750gb Seagates and they will be here on Saturday. That will give me six spindles and 3.6TB of usable space in RAID5. I may look at using RAID6 - not sure yet. That puts me at half capacity on the 1231ML card and my Silverstone TJ-09 will be full of drives. :)

So far this card is really nice. Areca support is good too - very responsive from Taiwan in the evenings. I'll post some benches once I get all six spindles up and running. That should give me a sustained copy of 320-360MB/sec in RAID5. I also added a Kingston KVR533D2E4/1GI 1gb PC2-4200 ECC Unbuffered memory module to my card, so I now have 1gb of cache. It works perfectly with the 1231ML and was only $47 from Newegg.
 
You can check on the net, not sure on that particular card, and YMMV, but everything I've seen says RAID6 is a dog, very slow. People say you're better off with RAID5+hot spare if you want capacity (otherwise RAID10 for speed+cap). If the speed was there RAID6 would be nice, but as it stands I think its only use is where you need capacity, are paranoid about losing a second drive during a rebuild, or where you cannot take the hit on a rebuild except on your terms (ie delay rebuild until server is in a down period while still maintaining a redundant capacity).
 
I'm using a 1210 with a 29160 and I've been booting off of the SCSI just fine. Haven't tested it the other way around but it should be workable if you haven't solved that problem already. I'm using Vista 32bit and haven't had any problems with it.
 
The issue relates to the Nvidia Raid on the 680i motherboard. If I shut off raid, it will initialize the card just fine. If the onboard raid is turned on, then the bios will give the option rom error. Windows still picks up the card just fine and I don't boot from the card, so it's all good. After flashing the 29160LP to the latest 3.10 firmware, I can fully post with all the cards installed. So it's not perfect, but workable.
 
unixadm said:
With RAID5 and a single 250gb LUN created to hold my OS, I'm seeing bursts of over 1000MB/Sec in HD Tach 32mb, and an average of about 235MB/Sec. While that's decent, it's not quite as good as I was hoping for.
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What are you going to use this array for that needs such high sequential transfer rates? How's the user experience running Windows off the array? Are you sure the array is done initializing?
unixadm said:
So far this card is really nice. Areca support is good too - very responsive from Taiwan in the evenings.
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That's good to hear. How many times have you had to contact them? Do the answers to your questions show up in the Knowledge Base?
 
unhappy_mage said:
What are you going to use this array for that needs such high sequential transfer rates? How's the user experience running Windows off the array? Are you sure the array is done initializing?

That's good to hear. How many times have you had to contact them? Do the answers to your questions show up in the Knowledge Base?
Click to expand...

I use my system to run several virtual servers, plus do quite a bit of file transferring. I mainly went with this controller and spent the money because after all the years of building systems, I always dumped money everywhere except redundancy and disk performance. So I decided to buy a card that would give me both and that also wouldn't be outdated tomorrow. Running Windows off of the array seems fine with four drives in RAID5. I only did that to test though, but with six drives it will surely improve even more.

I've contacted them several times. Most of my issues related to the bug in Vista X64 and 4gb of memory. It was not an Areca problem, but since the card was new, I checked there first. I also had somewhat high temperatures on my card and inquired about additional cooling. I'm not sure if that information made it to a FAQ, but they were quick to respond and helpful.
 
I installed Windows XP X64 tonight on the RAID5 partition. I'm still running four drives and I have to say the performance is great. I'm very pleased and will be even more so when I get the addition two 750gb's tomorrow.

The 1gb of cache is nice. Extracting anything takes mere seconds. I extracted SP2 for X64 so that I could slipstream my copy and it was done in like 3-4 seconds. I thought something was wrong it went so fast. Pretty cool to have cache. I certainly need to buy the Areca battery though. I'll do that next week.

I'm very pleased with how things are turning out. So far, so good.
 
Just a small update. I would have made more progress yesterday with my system, but as part of my testing I had the four 750gb drives sitting on my desk with a fan blowing on them. Well yesterday I bumped one of the cables and it disconnected the first drive from my array for about 15 seconds. That forced a rebuild of both volumes, however it was a good test. Everything worked fine and it took a little over six hours to rebuild with four 750gb drives. I waited several hours so that the process would finish and then I installed two more 750gb drives. I expanded the raid-set which is migrating right now. IT's been running for about 12 hours thus far and is at 90%. I figure it will take another two hours to finish up the migration and then I can build a 1.3TB volume.

Many people wonder how Windows performs under RAID5. Well on this card, windows is FAST. It's certainly faster than my dual 320gb 7200.10 RAID0 array I was running before. The one thing I didn't realize is that the 7200.10 drives ship with a jumper limiting them to SATA-I. So while I added the two drives yesterday, I remove the jumper from all eight drives. Since the array has been migrating/rebuilding, I have not had a chance to check and see if that helped with performance. More to come, but so far I really like this card. I'm ordering an ESATA bracket that accepts an SATAII cable (not one of the brackets with the cable already attached) so that I can use the two cables left on my controller for ESATA. Each port on my card has four SATA cables coming out, so I'm using six right now for the 750gb drives and that leaves me two more free. Since the controller can set ports as a pass-through, I can make use of the ports for an external device.
 
unix.. also set the card to 300+NCQ. Older drives or controllers didn't benefit from this, but the 1231ML and 7200.10s do. On my 1230 with some Hitachi drives, I noticed a drop in performance with NCQ turned on. When I upgraded to the 1231ML and 7200.10s, I did notice an increase in performance by enabling NCQ. I want to say that with file copies within the array I boosted performance from something like 140-150MB/s to 170-175MB/s
 
only thing i didnt like about any of the 939 boards, no x8 pcie in addition to the sli.


i have sli and want do to the same thing as you. i planned on my next upgrade to an intel solution, so thanks!
 
No problem. If you plan to run SLI with this card in the middle, plan on adding a 120mm fan blowing over the cards. I have one 8800GTX and it's like a small oven around that thing. I actually ended up moving the 1231ML from the blue 8x slot to the other 16x GPU slot to get it further away from the 8800GTX. It helped with the cooling of the card.

I gave the P35 chipset a hard look, but the 680i is very flexible. I just swapped my AR (bought right at launch) revision for an A1 revision as part of EVGA's swap program to gain better quad-core support. My system is rock solid stable and the swap was uneventful.

Things to remember with the 680I + Vista/XP64 + Areca:

1. For Vista installs use only 2gb of memory or less, then run windows update. Reinstall 4gb.
2. For Windows XP installs, use an IDE CD-ROM. I had STOP 07B errors when using an SATA DVD-RW to load the OS. I thought it was an Areca problem, but it was not.
3. Use Areca's latest drivers. If you are using Vista or XP64, use the STORPORT driver. If you are using XP32, use the SCSIPORT driver. STORPORT is not listed for XP64, but you can use the Vista X64 driver and it works fine.
4. P28 or newer bios on the 680I if using an EVGA. Seems like a good stable bios from what I can tell, and it includes the Intel microcode update.
 
Have you found anything that plugs into the Activity/Fault LED headers?

I can't find anything on google, and the thought of taking a floppy ribbon cable and attempting to solder LED's to the wires makes me cry.
 
I'm not using individual drive activity indicators because that's pretty much pointless with a single raid group. I just took my HDD led indicator and removed it from the motherboard header and plugged it into the global LED connector on the 1231ML. There are two global connectors, one for HDD activity and one that lights if there is a fault. However since the card makes a super loud beeping sound when there's a fault, a LED really isn't required. Using a ribbon cable would probably be the best way. There is also an LCD interface that connects to the card to give you status messages and such.
 
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