Areca 1882ix-16 motherboard compatibility

[lifespeed]

I am about to pull the trigger on an Areca 1882ix-16 version 3 RAID card. My Highpoint 3520 has annoyed me one too many times - it's favorite trick appears to be hanging windows for several minutes during boot, but I am also blaming it for my Asus Xonar D2X soundcard driver refusing to install because "the card is not plugged in". Sounds like an IRQ conflict or other such silliness. The RAID array aspect has been perfectly reliable, but I have about had it with not playing nice with the rest of the computer. It is an HTPC as well as a storage server in a Norco 4220 case, so soundcard issues are not going to work.

The motherboard I use is a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P (rev. 1.0). I do not have any plans to upgrade it for the next couple years as it is plenty powerful. Are there any known compatibility issues with this board and Areca? Hopefully I'm not blaming Highpoint for a Gigabyte problem. I know I can remove the 3 TB Hitachi drives and replace them with 1 TB drives and the boot hang problem goes away, so seems to point to Highpoint.

 

[lifespeed]

Got the ARC-1882ix-16

After building the 18TB RAID6 of 8 each Hitachi/Toshiba 5K3000 of two different vintages, the shiny new Areca appears to work well. I benchmarked with Atto at 700/800MB per sec write/read. It does not hang the PC for 3 minutes like the old Highpoint 3520 Hopefully no problems taking down the soundcard either.

At first glance it appears compatible with recent-vintage "supercomputer" motherboards like my Gigabyte GA-X58-UD4P. It takes a supercomputer motherboard to provide enough PCIe lanes to drive both high end video as well as RAID.

Below are attached the 2 generations, perhaps 3 model number schemes of our beloved Toshiba/Hitachi drives. The Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 are the original 5-platter 5700 RPM low power hand warmers. Mine would hit low 42 - 45C during operation. The Hitachi HDS5C3030BLE630 and TOSHIBA DT01ABA300 are the newer 3-platter drives which run at 5940 RPM and 36C. No big surprise there. I tried to update firmware on the old Hitachis, but the DOS updater wasn't right for the drives, and I could not install windows XP to use Hitest. XP must not like the RAID card, it would bluescreen while booting the install CD and ask me to remove any new hard drices. Hard drive firmware updates are not easy. I'll have to see if I can do a temp setup on another PC to flash the drives.

The new Areca card is really nice to use, easy to update firmware and configure, and does not require a web server run a service on the PC just to provide the management GUI.

SLOT 01(E)Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630
SLOT 02(10) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630
SLOT 03(11) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630
SLOT 04(12) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB Hitachi HDS5C3030BLE630
SLOT 05(A) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB Hitachi HDS5C3030BLE630
SLOT 06(B) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB TOSHIBA DT01ABA300
SLOT 07(C) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB TOSHIBA DT01ABA300
SLOT 08(D) Raid Set # 000 3000.6GB TOSHIBA DT01ABA300