Areca RAID card – any experiences good or bad ?

[Tom Brooks]

Nate,
The choice of the Seagates was based on their presence on the compatibility list from Highpoint which is on their support site. I wanted to stick to drives that were certified to work by the controller manufacturer. So I searched for specific model numbers and looked for deals on ten drives. I got ten drives with all the same firmware version (also specified by Highpoint). It’s likely that drives and firmware not on the list would also work, but I went by the book on that. Enhance Technology, the enclosure maker, also listed compatible controller cards and my Highpoint was on that list along with an Areca and an Atto. The CalDigit was not available at that time (wish it had been). I’ve always had good luck with Seagate Barracudas in the past. Hitachis have also been perfectly reliable for me.

I’d definitely point people to a higher end controller. The Highpoint 3522 could be considered as well as the Areca, Atto and CalDigit. It’s unclear to me what the risk to my RAID is if the power was to go out during a write to disk. I think it could be disastrous. I have the RAID on a good UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to prevent this. The UPS should be considered an essential part of the system if you don’t already have one, so figure that into the cost.

I don’t have a feature film with hundreds of hours of material stored on this unit, but I do have corporate projects that have to be there when the deadline approaches. I needed more security than I had with just the RAID-0 FW800 drives I had before. Now I put all my material on the RAID-5 and back up stills and projects to the FW drives.
-Tom

[Jared Picune]

Hey guys great info. I just wanted to mention a few of the unique features of the CalDigit RAID card since it has been mentioned in this thread. It’s the card that I’m very familiar with and I feel is a great product.

First not only does it allow you to do RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD internally on up to 4 drives, but externally as well on up to 12 drives. Using CalDigit’s HDElement makes setup a breeze and another unique feature is migration. This allows you to move and expand your RAID without data loss. This really makes it possible for endless possibilities and configurations. This means that you can expand over time so you don’t have to put up a ton of money all at once.

The volumes created with the RAID card are bootable and can even support bootcamp. And of course is is compatible with Mac, Window, and Linux system with PCIe.

The CalDigit RAID Card is 100% percent hardware RAID and uses an Intel Xscale processor with 256MB of cache. CalDigit also offers a money back guarantee, provides single vendor support, and for the low cost of $549 it’s hard to go wrong.

[Arnie Schlissel]

The Cal Digit looks like a great value.

All of the other cards in this class only support 4 or 8 drives externally, while Cal Digit is supporting 12 external plus 4 internal. The closest alternative would be an Areca card that supports 16 internal drives, but then you have to give up a slot to route your cables to the outside.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Chris Rye]

Areca was running a live demo showing 700+ MB/sec Read performance in both AJA and Blackmagic tests using only 8 drives in RAID 5 at NAB. CalDigit only claims up to 500MB/sec. So even if their both using the same Intel IOP, I quess the Areca engineering team delivers a better designed RAID controller around the Intel IOP to produce the higher performance. The 200MB/sec difference definetly compensates for the price difference.

I also saw the ARC-1680LP at their booth. It supports 4 internal drives and can connect external storage boxes, up to 128 drives if using a SAS expander box. This is definetly the best solution if you want expandability.

[Ricardo Reyes]

Hello Uli,

Areca is well known in the OEM market for several years now and is also known as the pioneer of RAID 6, with their introduction of the first RAID 6 PCIe RAID controller back 4 years ago. Just recently, when Areca introduced MAC drivers did Areca show up in the Mac and video market.

All the Areca RAID cards are supported by Mac by either PCIe or PCI-X envornments. Drivers are available for MAC 10.4 and drivers are allready included in the latest 10.5 (leopard)OS.

A 4 drive RAID 5 is expected to deliver 250+ MB/sec Read Perfomance.

Raid is meant for data redundancy. Always make a back up of your data!

[Walter Biscardi]

[Chris Rye] “Areca was running a live demo showing 700+ MB/sec Read performance in both AJA and Blackmagic tests using only 8 drives in RAID 5 at NAB. CalDigit only claims up to 500MB/sec. So even if their both using the same Intel IOP, I quess the Areca engineering team delivers a better designed RAID controller around the Intel IOP to produce the higher performance. The 200MB/sec difference definetly compensates for the price difference.”

Ah but the true question to ask of both Areca and CalDigit is for HOW LONG will those speeds hold up? See with any hard drive array, they will start to lose speed at about 75% full and then they will get progressively slower as they fill up.

700MB/s sounds really fast, but is that speed maintained at 50% full? 75% Full? 80% full? how long? If it can’t maintain the advertised speed up to 75% full, I consider that misleading advertising.

I know when it used to be HUGE Systems, those drives were always advertised with the slowest maintained speeds because they could absolutely guarantee the speeds. When the drives were empty, they were generally about 100MB/s or so faster than the advertised speed.

So that’s the real question to ask of these guys and quite honestly ANY hard drive manufacturer who makes a claim of speed. “Are these quoted speeds for a newly cleaned and empty array or is this an array that’s 75% full?”

I’m betting the CalDigit speeds are closer to reality than Areca for a “real world” drive that’s in use.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Uli Plank]

Thanks everybody for the great info!

I’m very aware of drives being slower when getting filled up, but wouldn’t that affect all cards in a similar progression? I haven’t heard yet of manufacturers to develop schemes for distributing data in a way to compensate for that effect (if at all possible), or are there any ?

Anyway, I think I’ll go for the CalDigit card, since I’m not aiming at ultimate speed, but rather expandability – fill the MacPro internally now, get an external box later.

Best regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Walter Biscardi]

[Uli Plank] “I haven’t heard yet of manufacturers to develop schemes for distributing data in a way to compensate for that effect (if at all possible), or are there any ?”

Medéa did. It was called Zone Striping whereby the the data was written to the inside and outside of the platters simultaneously. Speeds held up to about 90% full before you saw any performance drop. Now Avid owns them and I don’t see any other drive manufacturer offering the same idea. I ran Medéa’s for years until Avid made the purchase.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Brendan Coots]

I have the Areca 1220ML in a Leopard-based Xserve, connected to a NORCO DS1240 12 drive enclosure. When using 6 (mostly empty) drives in RAID 5, I am seeing speeds of 650MBps in Aja disc test.

I am, however, having occasional stability issues with file transfers hanging, forcing us to reboot the Xserve, at which point we lose the RAID volume. Bad news. Anyone seeing this type of behavior in Leopard?

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Ricardo Reyes]

We have seen multiple reports with RAID arrays running slow and losing drives with Norco’s solution. We are working toghether with Norco on getting the solution resolved. In the meantime, I have had two customers switch to another chassis (not Norco) and reported no issues.

Raid is meant for data redundancy. Always make a back up of your data!