Got my Areca 1220 Raid controller today.

Quasmo

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2004
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I just got my raid 5 controller (8x PCI-e) It was pretty expensive, but apparently it is COMPLETELY worth it. I am hooking up 6 500GB drives for a total of 2.5TBs. I'll post benchmarks later. It's initializing at the moment.

EDIT: Crap, this post sounds like a fricken blog entry. UGGGHHHH I hate my life.
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Definition of completely worth it would depend entirely on whether someone has money to burn and doesn't mind that a few percentage points of increased performance cost as much as an entire decent computer, or has some severely non-standard performance requirements.
 

Quasmo

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2004
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Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Definition of completely worth it would depend entirely on whether someone has money to burn and doesn't mind that a few percentage points of increased performance cost as much as an entire decent computer, or has some severely non-standard performance requirements.

Video editing server for multiple computers. I say it's worth it. And it's not just few percentages of an increase. Supposedly, it is about 25-50% faster.
 

RaiderJ

Diamond Member
Apr 29, 2001
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Currently I'm using a regular PCI RAID 5 card (Intel) for a 4 drive array. I've considered upgrading to a PCI-e card, but I wasn't sure exactly how to connect it.

If I purchased an SLI motherboard, could I use one 16x slot for the graphics card and the other for the RAID card? Or do you need a special motherboard?
 

stu1811

Senior member
Nov 9, 2005
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You might be better with a raid 10 or 1+0. With raid 5 you will get fast reads but normal speed writes.
 

Quasmo

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2004
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My boss wants raid 5, since its for video editing, write speeds are not that important as read speeds so RAID 5 should suit us great.
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Originally posted by: RaiderJ
Currently I'm using a regular PCI RAID 5 card (Intel) for a 4 drive array. I've considered upgrading to a PCI-e card, but I wasn't sure exactly how to connect it.

If I purchased an SLI motherboard, could I use one 16x slot for the graphics card and the other for the RAID card? Or do you need a special motherboard?

The primary slot is dedicated to graphics, but the second slot can be used for any PCIe card. The 1220 is an x8 PCIe card, so even a board which only uses 8 lanes for each of the slots would work, if the x8 for the graphics card wouldn't be an issue for you.

You don't necessarily need an SLI board though. An x1 slot has 500MBps of bandwidth. A 4 drive array of SATA 1.5GB drives has theoretical throughput of 600MBps, so you'd only be somewhat limiting the maximum burst rates (ignoring the transfer rate of cache on the card), and sustained transfer might be only half the x1 bandwidth. If you got a board with an x4 slot electrically (2GBps), you'd have more than enough bandwidth even for an 8-drive array. Many boards have a slot that is x16 physically, but only supplies 4 lanes of bandwidth; PCIe design requires cards to be compatible with any combination of lanes, as long as the slot is physically at least as large as the card. The Areca 1220 is only an x8 physical card, so even an x8 physical/x4 electrical slot will work fine, and the card will negotiate with the chipset and run at x4 speeds.

Of course the theoretical throughput to SATA 3GB drives is more than an x4 slot can handle, but that's again back to the burst rates. I expect the rates to the on-card cache would still exceed the x4 bandwidth but I don't know by how much.
 

krotchy

Golden Member
Mar 29, 2006
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Areca makes good controllers, so Im sure its totaly worth it. FYI, HD-Tach is completely useless for RAID 0 configurations, and for RAID 5 it works on some things and not on others. So if you end up with wierd HD Tach scores, just ignore them.

HD Tach claims my Hardware RAID 0 reads/writes at 32 MB/S avg, and it was jittery like crazy, also it claimed my burst was like below ATA-133. However a simple benchmark program that generates 300 random Frames of Uncompressed 4:2:2 1080i video shows it reading and writing speeds faster than 250 MB/S for large uncompressed video files.

My only concern for you, Is I have heard some controllers have issues creating single volumes greater than 2 TB, others have issues even allocating over 2TB across multiple partitions, and Windows XP 32/NTFS cant make paritions greater than 2 TB. I hope you checked into that on your particular controller and OS. Otherwise 2 1 TB Raid 5 configs using 3 drives each might be your only choice, or a single 2 TB parition. I hope you dont run into this problem, but you shoudl be aware it could happen.
 

RaiderJ

Diamond Member
Apr 29, 2001
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Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Originally posted by: RaiderJ
Currently I'm using a regular PCI RAID 5 card (Intel) for a 4 drive array. I've considered upgrading to a PCI-e card, but I wasn't sure exactly how to connect it.

If I purchased an SLI motherboard, could I use one 16x slot for the graphics card and the other for the RAID card? Or do you need a special motherboard?

The primary slot is dedicated to graphics, but the second slot can be used for any PCIe card. The 1220 is an x8 PCIe card, so even a board which only uses 8 lanes for each of the slots would work, if the x8 for the graphics card wouldn't be an issue for you.

You don't necessarily need an SLI board though. An x1 slot has 500MBps of bandwidth. A 4 drive array of SATA 1.5GB drives has theoretical throughput of 600MBps, so you'd only be somewhat limiting the maximum burst rates (ignoring the transfer rate of cache on the card), and sustained transfer might be only half the x1 bandwidth. If you got a board with an x4 slot electrically (2GBps), you'd have more than enough bandwidth even for an 8-drive array. Many boards have a slot that is x16 physically, but only supplies 4 lanes of bandwidth; PCIe design requires cards to be compatible with any combination of lanes, as long as the slot is physically at least as large as the card. The Areca 1220 is only an x8 physical card, so even an x8 physical/x4 electrical slot will work fine, and the card will negotiate with the chipset and run at x4 speeds.

Of course the theoretical throughput to SATA 3GB drives is more than an x4 slot can handle, but that's again back to the burst rates. I expect the rates to the on-card cache would still exceed the x4 bandwidth but I don't know by how much.

Running a graphics card at 8x would be fine, as I don't think the smaller bandwidth would affect the graphics that much... plus a file server I wouldn't be using primarily for games anyway.

It seems the only configuration of slots I see on most boards is an x16 and 2 1x slot, or two 16x and a couple 1x. Why there aren't more boards with 8x and 4x slots I don't know.
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Limited availability of lanes from the chipset, and ease of design. Most people would prefer to have 2 or 3 x1 slots, since the majority of add-in cards that even enthusiasts might want to buy are happy even with the bandwidth of PCI, so they don't particularly need anything more than x1 PCIe. In order to add in x4 slots or x8 slots, they have to sacrifice several x1 slots.

The nforce500 series now has enough lanes that it could allow a bit better slot provisioning. However most mainboard makers probably decide that running the extra traces for a higher bandwidth slot is probably not worth it, as the number of users who really want those larger slots are few, and the number who NEED it even less. So they stick with just 2 or 3 x1 slots, maybe making an x8 or x16 physical slot with only 1 lane of bandwidth. Or some few like Asus make a board with 2 x1 and an x4. Beyond that they start to run out of lanes pretty quickly. A single x4 lane could be used for 4 x1 lanes to provide a very wide range of upgradability for users.
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
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They sound like nice controllers. Options for LOTS of cache and BBU's are usually found on higher end mid grade enterprise stuff.