Areca 1222 8 Port SAS/Sata raid card

[septicdeath]

Anyone been able to get this card to do raid 50?

The instructions clearly state the card does raid 30/50/60. But it talks about a clickable Volume config option called Raid 30/50/60, however, my web interface has NOTHING like it.

The instructions seem like they were written by someone who doesnt speak english as a primary language, so even trying to follow them make little sense.

I have 6 drives connected (the minimum necessary for 2 raid 5's then raid 0'd) or raid 50.

Its real strange in that it mentions to create a raid set where it states

"To create RAID 30/50/60 volume, you need create multiple
RAID sets first with the same disk members on each RAID
set. The max no. disk drives per volume set: 8"

which would imply to me that I create a raid set twice, assigning the same disks (members) to each raid set, however, once a drive is assigned to a raid set, it isnt available to be assigned to a new raid set.


later it mentions ->

"To create 30/50/60 volume set from RAID set group, move
the cursor bar to the main menu and click on the “Create
Raid30/50/60” link. The “Select The Raid Set To Create Volume
On It” screen will show all RAID set number. Tick on the RAID
set numbers (same disk No per RAID set) that you want to create
and then click on the “Submit” button"

My Volume Set functions have no such clickable features.

I can only assume that maybe my web interface software on the card is old?

Can anyone assist me?

Thanks...

It's been 3 days (not including weekends) waiting for a response from areca, guess thats what I get for buying a card which the home web page is a .com.tw .... ;(


thanks

 

[sidewinder]

I would think you would need to create two RAID 5 sets that are identical in size but use 3 different drive in each set. Then you could stripe the RAID 5 sets to make a RAID 5+0 or RAID 50.

S-

 

[septicdeath]

That would be my assumption as well. I can create 2 raid sets consisting of 3 disks.

In the areca web control, you dont determine raid level until you create the volumes, unfortunately, when I try to create raid set, I am only able to configure each raid set as a seperate array (0,1,5,1+0) but no option to click like it says to on a create raid 30/50/60 link. Its almost like I have the wrong "web server software" running on the raid card, as I cant find the links that they tell me to click on.

 

[sidewinder]

Have you created both RAID 5 arrays and then checked to see if you can create the RAID 50 array?

S-

 

[septicdeath]

yeah. Although I created the 2 volumes on 2 raid sets, the “Create
Raid30/50/60” link. never presents itself in the create volume set section of the right side navigation window. The manual has a picture that shows the link as one of the 5 volume control features, but my navigation options in the corresponding section is missing from my options. Every store selling the card mentions that the card does 30/50/60, I have a small theory. To use the device in a MAC, I had to update the firmware to a OSX efi update, it consisted of a firmware, a sas rom, a bios rom, and a chip control bin, every file on the areca ftp server inside the folder labeled 1212 - 1222 is named something like 1212xxx-yyyy.bin, nothing on the ftp is called 1222xxx-yyyy (leaving me to assume that the firmware and updates for the 1222 card use the same as the 1212 card, the difference between the two cards are one card does 4 drives, and the 1222 does 8 drives. To configure a raid 50/60 you need 6 and 8 drives respectfully, and in the manual it has a astrick saying that the 1212 CANT do 30/50/60, I wonder if when I followed the forced update (the card didn't work without it, PERIOD) that I removed the option to do that level of raid. Seems stupid, but its the only thing I can think of, newegg, OWC, mac mall, all sites selling the card say it can do 30/50/60 so this all I can think of.

On second thought, I just tried rolling back the firmware to every single version located in the Areca 1212-1222 folder and none changed the options or the look of the embedded web application that is used to configure the raid card (Its connected to my dhcp network via a 2nd Ethernet cable) this is how you configure it on a EFI machine since there is no bios to boot to allow the bios configuration utility.

Owell, the only other thing I can say is that I have created the two 3 disk raid 5's but they are still "Initializing" and not in the "normal" status, I suppose it is possible that they have to be totally initialized before they can then be set to raid 0, considering that all the other functions of the card are present regardless of if you can use the function (for instance, I can see the delete hot spare clickable link, even without a hot spare allocated) I seriously doubt that the create 30/50/60 is going to appear at a later date.

I was real happy with the performance of the card, I am hoping its something simple, so update to the card firmware I missed or is not spelled out, because I would really like the performance gain I get with a raid 50 over the raid 5, especially since the available disk size is the same, I already am going against the norm. I have all 6 1.5tb disks configured as one volume containing the OS and all of my data. I suppose I could just leave it a raid 5 with a hot spare, I dont do audio/video or really push my mac, I just happened to have the raid card and the disks to utilize and am basically doing it because I can, not because I have pushed the machine to limits doing some mega a/v work, even though I work for CBS College Sports, Im not in the tv side, purely system administration of the back end web systems. so its more braggin rights than technically needed.


Anyone else out there have any experience with the Areca 1222 card, in a PC or a Mac? maybe the Areca tech support will answer my email this week, I located a "United States" support email, it still mails to areca.com.tw but maybe they have someone that speaks English as a primary language and can help me out. Its not like I paid 99.95 for this setup, I paid enough to expect support by someone who can actually communicate with me.

Thanks for your interest, I'll continue to update this thread as I get more answers, or others chime in with brainstorming, I expect a visit from nanofrog, as I have learned he is one of the lurkers here on M.Rumors that has lots of knowledge to share.

 

[rylin]

You don't want to run RAID-50, and you definitely don't want to run RAID-5.
If you have to, run RAID-6.

The RAID-50 array, while being able to lose a disk more than a RAID-5 array, will only be able to lose a disk on the second part of the array.

With R-50, you have

S0
D1 D2 D3

S1
D4 D5 D6

let's say you lose D1.
The array keeps chugging, albeit in a degraded state, constantly reading everything on D2 & D3.

You can still lose D4, D5 or D6 and still be fine, although it'll mean the second stripe gets degraded as well during the rebuild.

With that said, it's more likely you'll lose one of D2 or D3 as they're constantly being read when you rebuild the first array.
A URE on D2 or D3 (and remember, the odds of a URE happening during a rebuild increase with disk size) will:
1) Kill the first array.
2) Kill the stripeset.

At this point, you may be somewhat successful in recovering files from the array, but it involves a fair bit of work, and may actually not be entirely possible depending on how the Areca card works.

You're better off with something a bit less computationally intensive -- RAID-10 (though you'd lose another disk), or RAID-6.

Personally, I'd rather go the ZFS route or another FS letting you pool data.
If you really feel you need it, RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 is a good option.

Of course, it's still your equipment and your data, so it's up to you, but RAID-5 is teh devil

 

[septicdeath]

Thanks for the info, I had never read about ZFS, I thought I had heard about RAIDZ on my readynas, which is a linux nas box, so for all I know it uses ZFS, the problem is that I've gone and purchased the raid card, and have all the internal bays re-wired to the raid card. I can make all the disks pass through disks, but that just seems like a 500.00 dollar waste.

Right now, Im going rounds with areca, because I finally got a response from areca support, they tell me that the 1222 cant do raid 30/50/60, which surfaces another LARGE problem for me, considering that every site selling the card, as well as the product info specs and pdf off areca's site say that they do support it, see -> (http://www.areca.us/products/pcietosas01.htm)

but I get a email from a senior support tech telling me that the 1222 doesnt do it, only the 1680 supports it, thats a major issue in itself.

I very well may do raid 0+1 with hotspare. seems that overall performance would be best on this config, over raid 5 or 50.

 

[patpro]

I'm really surprised about the areca 1222 not supporting RAID 50/60... it's written everywhere in their own documentation.

Did you eventually managed to use this card with RAID 50 or 60 ?

With 10.6 arriving and killing support for G5's, I'm thinking about buying a Mac Pro, a RAID card, and a bunch of 2.5" SAS or SATA HDs. The Areca 1222 looked promising...

 

[septicdeath]

I'm really surprised about the areca 1222 not supporting RAID 50/60... it's written everywhere in their own documentation.

Did you eventually managed to use this card with RAID 50 or 60 ?

With 10.6 arriving and killing support for G5's, I'm thinking about buying a Mac Pro, a RAID card, and a bunch of 2.5" SAS or SATA HDs. The Areca 1222 looked promising...

NOPE, they pretended like I fell off the face of the earth, I attempted to reply to the previous engineer, and bounced.

Now that my system has been running at 01, I only look for new firmware, havent seen anything since my last update. With as good as they are supposed to be, you can imagine what a company that is 100% Taiwanese has for technical support, at least the cards are good and don't usually require much support.

 

[patpro]

NOPE, they pretended like I fell off the face of the earth, I attempted to reply to the previous engineer, and bounced.

that's a shame...
Fortunately, I'm still months away from buying a Mac Pro, so I've got some time to think about it. Thanks.

 

[septicdeath]

yes, a shame, but still decent cards

the 1680 is worth looking into, the cards really have been uneventful (I have 2 1222's and 2 1680's). its just shame that they dont have them doing what they claim they will, my box has it as a major bullet point right on the front and the rear... owell... still better than the Mac card.

-SD

 

[nanofrog]

the 1680 is worth looking into, the cards really have been uneventful (I have 2 1222's and 2 1680's). its just shame that they dont have them doing what they claim they will, my box has it as a major bullet point right on the front and the rear... owell... still better than the Mac card.

-SD

What you'e run into is the only "blight" I've seen with Areca's. I'm using the ARC-1680ix12 and ARC-1231ML. They do what they advertise.

And yeah, their tech support is cryptic (emails), as I've never even attempted it over the phone.

 

[septicdeath]

Decided a needed to waste a day off... |Stupid Me|

(Just posting this incase it can help anyone, sorry so long, but well, like I said I decided to waste a day or so)

Well, everything has been running way to good for quite some time now, so I decided to look at Areca's site and noticed that a firmware along with an official driver update (plus a even newer beta driver) had been released. I had just SuperDuper'd my system to a external nas that has fire wire connectivity as well (so its bootable, its SLOW, but hell, its a full bootable system backup). SO I said, what the hell, lets update the firmware to 1.47.90625 (which actually includes a MBR update, a BIOS update, a Firmware update, and a boot update). The update went smooth, except now my system doesn't see the raid array at boot time, so I boot from the backup. Once Im logged in, my raid array is there, all my data is there as well, but I expected that, havent had a firmware update loose data since the inception.

This is when I remember reading somewhere on a support site somewhere and when I first built the array that the Areca's EFI Boot routines are not installed to the card, and I have to navigate basically to the \pub\ directory of Areca's site to fork off a couple of directories to locate a EFI Compatiable BOOT .bin (mind you, last updated May 2008). You would think that they would include this in the MACPro directories containing the New driver or in the Firmware directories, but I'm just bringing it up so that if anyone else reads this and forgets, a full firmware update package kills the efi boot routines, so you better have a usb or firewire drive to boot a backup or management os disk to boot IF you dont have the 1222 which has the ethernet connection on it, luckily I can use any computer in the house to push the efi boot routines to the card via its web interface, but if you dont have the ethernet, you have to jump through hoops with a management OS with the areaca os drivers and archHTTP or the CLI interface.

Anyways, now the arrary is visable at boottime, but it wont boot, it keeps hanging, but thats okay, now EFI is posting the array at least, so I can do what I wanted to do, which is test the 30/50/60 features.

At least with this attempt to build the array the Create 30/50/60 option is available under the Volume Set Functions. The only problem is that when I click it, I get a Not Enough Raidset In Normal State available.

To create a Raid 0/1/5/5+1/6/6+1 you do that all in the menu above the Volume functions in the Raid Set Functions, so I am going to play with it. I assume that I need to create a couple of Raid Sets and then let them initialize which is where they get tagged -Normal-.

So it might be that they finally got the 30/50/60 functions working. We shall see.

-SD

 

[nanofrog]

(Just posting this incase it can help anyone, sorry so long, but well, like I said I decided to waste a day or so)

Well, everything has been running way to good for quite some time now, so I decided to look at Areca's site and noticed that a firmware along with an official driver update (plus a even newer beta driver) had been released. I had just SuperDuper'd my system to a external nas that has fire wire connectivity as well (so its bootable, its SLOW, but hell, its a full bootable system backup). SO I said, what the hell, lets update the firmware to 1.47.90625 (which actually includes a MBR update, a BIOS update, a Firmware update, and a boot update). The update went smooth, except now my system doesn't see the raid array at boot time, so I boot from the backup. Once Im logged in, my raid array is there, all my data is there as well, but I expected that, havent had a firmware update loose data since the inception.

This is when I remember reading somewhere on a support site somewhere and when I first built the array that the Areca's EFI Boot routines are not installed to the card, and I have to navigate basically to the \pub\ directory of Areca's site to fork off a couple of directories to locate a EFI Compatiable BOOT .bin (mind you, last updated May 2008). You would think that they would include this in the MACPro directories containing the New driver or in the Firmware directories, but I'm just bringing it up so that if anyone else reads this and forgets, a full firmware update package kills the efi boot routines, so you better have a usb or firewire drive to boot a backup or management os disk to boot IF you dont have the 1222 which has the ethernet connection on it, luckily I can use any computer in the house to push the efi boot routines to the card via its web interface, but if you dont have the ethernet, you have to jump through hoops with a management OS with the areaca os drivers and archHTTP or the CLI interface.

Anyways, now the arrary is visable at boottime, but it wont boot, it keeps hanging, but thats okay, now EFI is posting the array at least, so I can do what I wanted to do, which is test the 30/50/60 features.

At least with this attempt to build the array the Create 30/50/60 option is available under the Volume Set Functions. The only problem is that when I click it, I get a Not Enough Raidset In Normal State available.

To create a Raid 0/1/5/5+1/6/6+1 you do that all in the menu above the Volume functions in the Raid Set Functions, so I am going to play with it. I assume that I need to create a couple of Raid Sets and then let them initialize which is where they get tagged -Normal-.

So it might be that they finally got the 30/50/60 functions working. We shall see.

-SD

Thanks for the update. You can still get 1.46 and step back if need be.

I'll have to check up on the new firmware revision for the models I have before I update. I'm cautious, and haven't had any issues yet. But I won't try the Beta versions at all either. Too much potential for trouble on anything but a test system.