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JobJoe

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Which of these two raid cards will work better?

Feb 22, 2012 8:10 AM

Which of these cards would be better suited for video editing:

Areca ARC-1882i

LSI 9265-8i

Both are approximately the same price and just in my price range. I will have four 1TB HDD's that I want to put in a raid array. Also assume either one will work with my X79 motherboard.

1610 Views 19 Replies Latest reply: Jim Curtis, Apr 10, 2012 3:26 PM

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1. Harm Millaard,

Feb 22, 2012 8:59 AM in reply to JobJoe

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My preference would be the Areca, because for around € 40 you can upgrade the cache memory to 4 GB, assuming a 12+ port model. With less ports, there is no cache memory upgrade available, but still the Areca has the benefit of Raid3, which the LSI lacks.

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2. JobJoe,

Mar 19, 2012 11:36 AM in reply to Harm Millaard

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I know this thread is a few weeks old, but I think I will be getting the card soon. I almost bought the LSI because it has the CacheCade option, but I think I have decided to get the 1882ix-12 with extra cache memory instead.

Do you know if you need to purchase the 4GB memory stick from Areca or is it possible to get an 8GB stick. If the 8GB of memory is possible, will it even help?

Is there anything else I need to know before I buy this?

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3. JEShort01,

Mar 19, 2012 11:50 AM in reply to JobJoe

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JobJoe,

I would suggest getting the "-4G" model card (1882ix-12-4G) that already has the 4GB RAM installed.

Regarding 3rd party RAM, I am not saying that it cannot work, but if you search the web you will find a lot of users that have tried 3rd party RMA with Areca's 1880 series (similar to 1882 series) and never gotten it to work properly.

Regards,

Jim

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4. JobJoe,

Mar 20, 2012 2:46 AM in reply to JEShort01

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Good suggestion. Just a few more questions:
1) The model that comes with cables looks like each cable only has one SATA connector per cable. Is this correct?
2) Will I be able to use raid on the card and AHCI mode set in my bios?

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5. Harm Millaard,

Mar 20, 2012 3:20 AM in reply to JobJoe

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1. The normal configuration is with forward break-out cables. They connect to one connector on the card and have 4 SATA connectors on the other side to connect to the disks.
2. AHCI mode is independent of your raid settings on the Areca.

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6. JobJoe,

Mar 26, 2012 12:28 PM in reply to Harm Millaard

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I now have the 1882ix-12-4G installed and have 2 HDD's connected just to do some testing. This thing is even faster than I imagined. I plan to run AS SSD, ATTO, and Crystal Disk Mark to get a starting point. If anyone is interested, I may post those results here. I have run ATTO and ended up with reads of 2500 MB/s and writes of 3400 MB/s.
I plan to get 6 Hitachi drivers in raid, which should be even faster.

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7. Bill Gehrke,

Mar 26, 2012 3:40 PM in reply to JobJoe

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The most reliable and believable disk benchmark in my opinion is HD Tune Pro. Those ATTO marks are just testing the cache here is a write example of 8 each 15K.2 Seagate's in R0.

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8. JobJoe,

Mar 27, 2012 5:52 AM in reply to Bill Gehrke

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I have tried the free version of HD Tune in the past. I will have to try that again.

I just discovered that my Acronis imaging software does not see the Areca or the drives attached to it. What imaging software can be used that sees the Areca and can make image files and also be able to restore image files to and from the Areca?

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9. JobJoe,

Apr 5, 2012 10:48 AM in reply to JobJoe

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Can someone help me with some HDTune results. The only difference between the two is a setting in the Areca settings. The drives are two WD 2TB drives in Raid0 that I am using for testing before I get the 6 Hitachi drives. The first image is using the default settings and the second one Is with Disk Write Cache Mode enabled. Note that the scale on the left is not the same.

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10. JEShort01,

Apr 5, 2012 12:09 PM in reply to JobJoe

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JobJoe,

I can confirm that ShadowProtect Desktop Editon works great with Areca images for both backup and restore. I have even backed up a RAID OS/boot array from the Areca controller and restored it to a single drive connected to an Intel motherboard controller - how cool is that! It's insanely fast too; imaging my pretty fast RAID 0 boot/OS/programs array with 61GB only takes 2:36 minutes (23.3 GB/min, 279 MB/s, 2232 Mbits/sec). Note too that the affordable "Desktop edition" allows you to any drive on your LAN; I'm pretty sure that to do a restore with this version you can't restore from the LAN, however I've copied the restore image down to a USB hard drive (from the LAN) and then restored to a PC as "stand-alone".

Regarding the HD Tune Results your results are for all practical purposes the same; you can ignore the maximum read speed with the cache on (that's from the controller) for the purposes of benchmarking your drive speed. Regarding the scale difference, I find the "autoscaling" only annoying, but I'm not aware of a way to override it.

Finally, your WD 2TB's "tail off" (slow down) less than most rotating drives I've ever tested using HD Tune Pro; what is the exact model # and firmware version that you are using?

Regards,

Jim

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11. JobJoe,

Apr 5, 2012 2:04 PM in reply to JEShort01

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The model number is WD2002FAEX. They are SATA III (6GB/s) and have a 64MB cache on each drive. Not sure about the firmware, but I got them about 9 months ago.

What about the white spots? They are in a different place - not sure what they represent.

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12. JEShort01,

Apr 5, 2012 3:16 PM in reply to JobJoe

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White spots are "seek speed" and they are basically the same speed for both runs (use the scale on the right side of the graph for seek speed).

Jim

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13. JobJoe,

Apr 5, 2012 4:55 PM in reply to JEShort01

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Just for completeness - I have attached the HDTune results for a pair of SSD's in raid 0 run on the Areca.

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14. Bill Gehrke,

Apr 5, 2012 6:17 PM in reply to JobJoe

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Of course the SSD read results are only half the story with usage the write performance drops significantly.

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15. Jim Curtis,

Apr 9, 2012 4:32 PM in reply to Bill Gehrke

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This wasn't in your list of choices, but for me, I'll never buy another controller card that's not an ATTO. You're going to see similar specs from many different manufacturers, but the difference with ATTO is the support. I bought an R680 card that started acting up after about three weeks. I called tech support, described my problem, and I had a new card on my doorstep at 8 AM the next morning.

Ask the company you plan to buy from if they cross ship an RMA. If they don't, expect to be out of business for at least three days, and expect to pay your own overnight shipping both directions.

I mistakenly bought a HighPoint Tech RocketRAID as my first controller card. It went bad, and it took THREE WEEKS to get a replacement. Oy!

Another option is to buy from a VAR that has great service after the sale, and maybe you can get an ATTO-like experience, if they have the same committment to customer satisfaction.

If these aren't important considerations, then please excuse me for butting in.

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16. Harm Millaard,

Apr 10, 2012 12:34 AM in reply to Jim Curtis

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And Atto is the only one to support Raid4. Of course that is of little value is that is not the level you want. Back in the middle ages of raid controllers, they had a big corporate client that insisted on using raid4 and since that time they are the only manufacturer to include that raid level.

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17. JobJoe,

Apr 10, 2012 2:05 PM in reply to Harm Millaard

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Jim Curtis: I have already purchased the ARC-1882ix-12-4G and think it works quite well for my purposes. Thanks Harm for the suggestion.

I have the two SSD's which I plan to put into Raid 0 for the boot drive. I assume I can do that if they are attached to the 1882, correct?

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18. Bill Gehrke,

Apr 10, 2012 2:16 PM in reply to JobJoe

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HUGH mistake, there is no advantage to putting two SSD drives in RAID 0 for your boot drive. Microsoft's TRIM will not work on RAID configurations of SSD's. I would not even think of putting a single SSD for boot purposes as writing to it will slow down as it is used.

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19. Jim Curtis,

Apr 10, 2012 3:26 PM in reply to JobJoe

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JobJoe wrote:

Jim Curtis: I have already purchased the ARC-1882ix-12-4G and think it works quite well for my purposes.

My HPT card worked quite well for a while, too. But, you've already read my sob story about that. I wish you continued success with it.

Harm, ATTO has yet another RAID level... DV RAID. Yet, nobody seems to be endorsing its use for video, even though it was specficially designed for it. RAID 5 is still the choice of four out of five doctors, with RAID 6 as a fallback for the risk-averse.

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