Super Slow Boot on RAID0 SSDs

The areca ARC-1210 is an older controller, but it has gotten a good reputation, and seems to have excelent transfer speeds with SSDs; though I have not found any benchmarks for this card with Intel SSDs; mostly super-talent and OCZ Core series. It is also one of the cheapest hardware RAID adapters on the market. I would not buy it before you confirm it works good with Intel, but it is a good place to start, as it has been confirmed to have read speeds over 700MBPS with three OCZ SSDs.

I have also seen a few mentions of a hacked/fixed driver for your controller that gets read speeds of over 400MBPS with two intel SSDs...but I have neither the SSDs nor the chipset to test this...and I didn't stumble on any links to a download anyway.

 

The main RAID user among my mates is a strong supporter of Areca stuff and has had several of their cards, rates them all very highly. It's rather tragic, however, that even a 4-port version costs almost half as much again as one of the SSDs...

 

At least it is cheaper than the top-end Intel SSDs...by a couple hundred bucks. The 8 port versions are a much better deal in terms of dollars per port, but to get more than 4 SSDs is a huge investment in itself.

 

I'll look into it and see what would work out best on for Intel SSDs. I think I will go with a 4 port card as to have some room to expand should I add a 3rd SSD to the array. I dont see myself adding a third drive soon, but I'd rather be prepared.

 

That is a good idea...I wish I was thinking like that when I bought my 4-port; I would have gotten an 8-port instead.

 

and indeed, I'm eventually after an 8-port but am already using 8 drives, I'm really after a 12-port, but their cost is huge (though granted, better value than the smaller cards by far)

 

Are these cards valuable for non-RAID SATA use or only when RAID'ing?

Dick

 

Well, they work fine, but spending that much on S-ATA ports only is absurd, since you could just get some cheap host cards that would do the same job for far less cost. Since I'm not using SSDs yet, I run 6 S-ATA ports off the PCI bus for my server's hard drives. They cost me less than the current value of a 750GB HDD between them. Compare that to the cost of five 1.5TB drives for an 8-port RAID card.

 

Thanks. I've never used any outboard hardware SATA controllers and I was simply curious if their benefit was limited to RAID applications.

Dick

 

Not at all, they're just more cost-effective that way - most of the time you can't get get big controller cards unless they also have good RAID functionality. The only cheap ones you tend to get are 2 or 4 port PCI cards, which are limited to the PCI bus's 133MB/s combined throughput. Fine for 1 or maybe 2 drives, for 6 it's a bit iffy, but fine as long as they're not in use all at once.