Areca ARC-1120 vs Adeptec 2820 for RAID 6

[Mike Tancsa]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:16:00 +0000, in sentex.lists.freebsd.questions
you wrote:

>
>One server supplier says customer's he's supplie with ARC boards were unhappy 
>with them, but didn't give any specific reasons.  Does anyone have any 
>experience with either of these on FBSD?
>
>There's a long comparison of the three cards at 
>http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_for_raid_controllers/ .  The 
>Areca board canes the others performance-wise but I want to know if it will 
>be stable for the next however many years.

I have been using them in a few boxes and they certainly are quite
fast under RELENG_6.  I have some running RAID5 and RAID10 have they
really good disk IO.  Prior to running ARECA cards I used exclusively
3wares.  However, their performance was just not there until their SX
cards came out.  They are much closer in performance to the ARECA and
I think they are stable now as well, but they dont have PCI-e versions
of the card which I am looking for more and more.  I was told that is
coming soon now.

On FreeBSD, the drives show up as a SCSI device

da0 at arcmsr0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Areca ARC-1210-VOL#00 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device 
da0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit), Tagged
Queueing Enabled
da0: 228881MB (468749312 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 29178C)

In short, I would recommend the card if you need speed under FreeBSD.

	---Mike
--------------------------------------------------------
Mike Tancsa, Sentex communications http://www.sentex.net
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mike at sentex.net, (http://www.tancsa.com)