areca ARC-1260 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card

This was the integral part of a fileserver I purchased and assembled February this year. In its initial configuration the machine has eight 1TB drives in a RAID6 array, providing 5.45TB formatted space. Both the 3U chassis I went with (Norco RPC-3116)...

Supports 16 drives on SATA2 ; Supports RAID6 ; Expandable cache ; Came with all necessary cables ; Very good documentation included ; Easy to navigate firmware menus ; PCI-E 8x

Default bundled cache seems small for the number of drives it supports ; Newegg did not carry the upgraded 1GB cache module at the time of purchase ; Expensive...but if you want a real RAID with real reliability, why cheap out

Debian Etch's stock kernel includes drivers for the card. Apparently, drivers also made it into the 2.6.19 vanilla source, too, so any newer distribution won't have issues with it. They have binary drivers on their website and a source patch for older...

Great Linux/FreeBSD driver support, embedded ethernet port for remote configuration outside of the OS, sixteen ports, extremely fast RAID6 engine. A book for the manual, rather than a pamphlet. Decent right-angle cables included. The cli32/cli64...

Price, but it's worth every penny of it, and in an enterprise environment it isn't really that expensive.

Works great. I had no problems getting this to work with XP and Linux RHEL 4. It's fast and combined with three 5-in-3 SATA backplanes, I was able to fit 16 front removable drives in one case. I'm using RAID 5 with 5 drive sets

This didn't work with the first MB I tried. I assume the MB didn't support PCIe x8 correctly. It just beeped at me without POSTing (no bios error or anything)

According to 3ware, they do not "officially" support desktop mobo's, although you can find anecdotal evidence on the net and in some of the 3ware reviews on newegg that they do on some boards.

Ports galore! For high quality, high performance controllers, it's either areca or 3ware/AMCC.

Sloooooow controller F/W initialization - roughly 15 seconds. Wish all 16 ports were together instead of having 6 on the side, but that's kind of being nit-picky.

According to 3ware, they do not "officially" support desktop mobo's, although you can find anecdotal evidence on the net and in some of the 3ware reviews on newegg that they do on some boards. This card is supported by a vast array of desktop...

Ports galore! For high quality, high performance controllers, it's either areca or 3ware/AMCC ; Intel IOP333 is plenty fast unless you're running an enterprise level server with extremely high I/O demands (like an MS SQL Server DB with lots of...

Sloooooow controller F/W initialization - roughly 15 seconds. Wish all 16 ports were together instead of having 6 on the side, but that's kind of being nit-picky ; I have a RAID 5 stripe set to 128KB and all other RAID functions at default, 4 Seagate...

I used this card to build a data node for a cluster using the supermicro cse-933 and they work great together. Using 15 500GB drives in RAID6 provides me ~6.5TB, so I can't complain.

The manual isn't a pamphlet like so many these days. Its more of a book. Also comes with a passive heatsink to replace the active hsf, if so desired. But if you're using this in a server environment... who cares!

16 SATA cables really makes a spaghetti mess! The firmware interface is cruder than others but it has more to do with friendliness rather than features.

The manual isn't a pamphlet like so many these days.

16 SATA cables really makes a spaghetti mess! The firmware interface is cruder than others but it has more to do with friendliness rather than features.

You'll need that second psu to use 16 hard drives.

Best raid card I've ever used, even my old job's data center didn't have anything this nice.

1/3 the cost of my truck.

Best raid card I've ever used, even my old job's data center didn't have anything this nice.

1/3 the cost of my truck.

I compared the speed for a 5-drive RAID5 between the hardware RAID and Linux software RAID, and the controller was about ~30% faster when reading and comparable when writing. CPU usage was lower, of course, but not high either way. I'm not sure the...

Can run raid5/6 and convert an existing array from 5 to 6. Supports staggered spinup in combination with enclosures that also do so

Staggered spinup is flaky. While it works *most* of the time, when a new drive is connected to the card it appears to spin up all drives immediately on POST. This means you can't rely on the staggered spinup when sizing your PSU, because every now and...