November 09, 2011   Paul Alcorn   8 Comments

Areca ARC-1882x 2nd Gen 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID Card Review – 4.7GB/s Transfer Performance!

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Today in our lab we will be testing  two of the new Areca ARC-1882 Second-Generation 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID adapters.

Yes folks, that’s a plural and we are lucky enough to have two of these beasts in our hot little hands.  Get ready for speeds as you seldom see in any technology and review forum.  Sit down, buckle up and hold on for the ride of your life because for the first time ever, we have reached an UNBELIEVABLE 4.7GB/s disk performance speed!

INTRODUCTION

Areca has long been a leader in RAID controller technology with a long line of reliable and high performing RAID controllers. Many in the enthusiast community particularly admire Areca and their controllers as they have a penchant for using large amounts of DRAM cache and their firmware goes further to providing premium cache leverage. For desktop computing, the Areca family is hard to beat.

Areca RAID controllers are known for  their highly customizable settings.  This is enhanced by firmware and options in Areca’s controllers, along with the GUI, that are far superior to most enterprise RAID cards. Considered by many as a ’boutique’ RAID company that caters to the high performance crowd, Areca prides itself in their extensive hardware options that allow users to really customize and tweak the performance of their RAID solutions. Other finer points of these controllers include their excellent and easy to use out-of-band storage controls which can be very handy when used in servers.

Customer service is a hallmark of Areca and fast timely resolution to any issues that may crop up is assured. This is probably Arecas greatest strength and here they continue to deliver.  So much so, in fact, that many competitive overclockers and benchmarkers consistently use these devices as their first choice for high performance computing. Many world records in benchmarking realms have been set using these controllers, as will many more in the future.

A staple in data centers worldwide, Areca controllers are known for being rugged and demonstrate excellent reliability.

Building upon the wild success of their 1880 line of controllers, Areca is looking to take things to the next level utilizing a dual core ROC that is a step up from the single core ROC used in the previous generation.

Where will we see the benefits? How will a single core solution stack up against the dual core variant, especially in Parity RAID sets?  Today we set out to test the 1882 vs its predecessor, the 1880, in a number of tests that will showcase the strengths of this newest controller in Arecas line. We are also going to explore the amount of customizations that the Areca controllers afford, and some of the features that makes them such a sought after solution for so many users.

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Posted in: RAID Cards, RAID Testing, Raid/Enterprise
  • Tim Chambers

    Need another 8 to 16 SSD’s to fully load RAID card setup. Would also like to see the impact of the 4GB cache and higher IOPS.

    • http://www.facebook.com/avery.yates Avery Yates

      The dropoff you see with the dual setup is just a programming glitch in atto disk benchmark. It used to be the same with transfers above 1GB/sec in earlier versions. Downloadn an older version to test with and you’ll see what I mean.

      Kind regards.

    • Zpunky

      I’ve got a setup with 20 SSDs across multiple RAIDs and, at least with ATTO, I get ***MUCH*** better results with non-cached/unbuffered (Direct I/O) tests… can’t figure out why this is though. Very frustrating.
      The Areca documentation is pretty awful, giving the briefest of descriptions on card functions, and even those are open to interpretation, leaving me to wonder what the heck they’re actually talking about (I mean, what does this mean, in practice, “The “Read Performance Margin” is for controller to reserve n% read margin during AV stream recording.” Can the card magically determine that you’re system is streaming A/V, versus a very large sequential DB write, and what is the ‘read margin’ it’s reserving n% of??? Do they mean it reserves n% of the read cache you’ve set?
      In practice, I’m getting better performance from an HP P410i with only 512 MB memory than I am with the 1882 with 4GB. I’d really like to have some more informative instructions about the configuration options.
      I also think it would be much more effective if these setting cold be by array, like the P410i, and not for the card as a whole.

  • woodstock

    “After that the results do drop off a cliff with the larger file sizes, as we get away from the stripe limitations of the dynamic disk.”
    What limit is this??? Have you ever considered that the ATTO benchmark uses 32 bit unsigned integers to store the results, so it cannot display numbers bigger than 4294967295 bytes/sec.

  • Guest

    There’s a typo on pg 9 – right top picture is for 1880ix, not 1882ix.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6OXY3TQIBQUYCWWD3WOD524SC4 Vessa

    Does the Crucial m4 drives compatible with the 1882 ?

    • Chris

      Yes, I’m using Crucial M4s, both the 256 and 512GB versions. Be sure to update ALL SSDs with the latest FW rev 000F because the previous versions (0009 and 0309) have fatal flaws.

  • Eric Barr

    I’ve used Areca products for years in the corporate environment and like them quite a bit. The below statement about service, however, is laughable.
    > Customer service is a hallmark of Areca and fast timely resolution
    > to any issues that may crop up is assured

    Have you ever tried to get a card serviced? I have. When there is hardware failure you mail off your card and wait 2-3 weeks for it to come back. There is no option to provide a credit card & have another refurbished card cross-shipped to you right away. This means whatever system just failed is down for 2-3 weeks. RAID cards are about reliability, it means you need spare card hanging around if you’re worried about failure. Not exactly a cost effective solution.