Hitachi SMART status temps are way wrong

[Bob Zelin]

Hi John –
I am going to bash you now. I am sure that you are a very nice guy.
You bought a product, and you expected it to work.

So what has happened here. You did not buy from a VALUE ADDED RESELLER that would help you every step of the way. You wanted to buy from Amazon, get the cheapest possible price, with NO SUPPORT, and when things didn’t work, you became frustrated. If you had spent more money with a VALUE ADDED RESELLER, that would have helped you with the install, then you would not have suffered as you did.

The ATTO R680 card is a great card, but requires setup. So does the Areca ARC-1882x. These products just don’t plug in and work. The Areca cards are notorious for having difficulty getting into the web gui. Only recently has the MRAID Utility been fixed for Areca.

What I have learned is that NONE OF THESE COMPANIES (ATTO, Areca, Highpoint, LSI Logic) are anything like AJA, who makes products that just plug in and work, and have extensive EASY TO READ AND FOLLOW documentation, and wonderful FREE tech support. AJA is the exception. To get a painless experience with drive arrays and host adaptor cards, you MUST go thru a VALUE ADDED RESELLER that knows the product.

For years I have seen people say “I bought this on Amazon”, or I bought this on B&H Photo” and they get frustrated and angry.
That is why value added resellers exist. And they charge money for this service.

I am glad you have the ARC-1882x working. It’s a great card.
But so is the ATTO R680.

Bob Zelin

[John Davidson]

I’ve built quite a few RAIDs at this point so I wasn’t going into it green. I actually enjoy the process usually, but this time I was that one in a million guy who got a defective card. ATTO pretty much wrote me off as of last Wednesday, so believe it or not I’m thankful that I have Amazon’s protections in place to return this card.

You’re right in that people who are completely new to it should go through a VAR, at least until Mac Pros get Thunderbolt. After that happens I can’t imagine why anyone would need to buy these types of cards, aside from large server setups.

[John Davidson]

Update: We had an old R380 that broke when moving our server. To access the media on the old R380 RAID, I got another R680 – it works flawlessly.

I really did have a crap card.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.