Excerpts from Stan Hoeppner's message of 2014-02-25 15:08:44 -0500: > Only enough to recommend you to replace it immediately with an LSI or > Adaptec. Areca is an absolutely tiny Taiwanese company with inferior > product and, from what I gather, horrible support for North American > customers, and Linux customers in general. The vast majority of their > customers seem to be SOHOs and individuals using the boards in MS > Windows servers, with very few running more than a handful of drives, > and few running lots of drives doing serious work. Noted. > If you run into any kind of performance issue with their board, and > explain to them your number of drives and arrays, OS platform and > workload, they'll be baffled like a 3rd grader and have no idea how to > respond. For better or worse, this will be in line with the "support" I've experienced from the vast majority of vendors I've had to deal with. > The Areca uses inferior older technology, has inferior performance, > limited firmware feature set which doesn't support spans > (concatenation), near non-existent US support especially for advanced > Linux workloads/users, only offers battery cache backup, and is all of ... > > $10 USD cheaper than the category equivalent yet vastly superior LSI. Does seem to be the case. > By some off chance you don't already know, LSI is the industry gold > standard RAID HBA. They are the sole RAID HBA OEM board supplier to > Dell, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Fujitsu/Siemens, etc, and their ASICs are used > by many others on their in house designs. LSI's ASICs and firmware have > seen more Linux workloads of all shapes and sizes than all other > vendors' RAID HBAs combined. I am aware; all our servers have LSI in them for boot arrays and whatnot. > Given all of the above, and that there are at least 3 other LSI boards > of superior performance, in the same price range for the past year, why > did you go with Areca? For better or worse, they're what we were able to get from our white box vendor. It will, unfortunately, have to do for now. I'll be sure to make a note for future expansion. Until then, we'll just have to tread carefully. Thanks again for all of your help. -- Morgan Hamill _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
