Areca 1882IX PCIE 3.0 Raid Controller - Need help

Question

I'm extremely frustrated!   I installed my new Areca Raid Card and can't get it to work!
First was the issue of creating a driver disk.   After hassling with tools for two hours I finally found an old diskette drive and installed it on my system.  That finally worked.
Then when I tried to install the driver, first it didn't seem to install.  I clicked Tab + F6 during boot-up and apparently that did nothing.  However it looked like it installed something.   Windows 7/64 blue-screened constantly until I restored it to an earlier version.   I went through this install to blue-screen process twice!  
Anybody know any tricks to making this raid card work?   Remember that this PCIE V3.0, not 2.0.   Is this card ready for prime time? 
If this thing won't work, are there any other quality controllers that WILL work?
Thanks,
Dan.

Answer 1

Chris,
As the biblical saying goes...  "Ask and ye shall receive."  Results below...
The first set are the Raid 3 disk set - five Seagate Disks in Raid 3 (with one additional disk as a hot spare).   The file perf of large files seem quite brisk to me.  The performance with small files looks poor by comparison.  
The second set are the Raid 0 disk set - two WD 10K Velociraptors in Raid 0.   The file perf of large files seem quite good too.  The performance with small files looks poor by comparison, but better than Raid 0.
Of course I've never run this test, so I have nothing for comparison.   How do these compare with your system? 
Regards,
Dan.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read :   495.624 MB/s
Sequential Write :   567.949 MB/s
Random Read 512KB :   871.340 MB/s
Random Write 512KB :   103.259 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :    13.506 MB/s [  3297.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     3.242 MB/s [   791.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     1.409 MB/s [   343.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     3.760 MB/s [   917.9 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [D: 32.4% (1206.8/3725.2 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/09/08 18:19:37
OS : Windows 7  SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read :   227.531 MB/s
Sequential Write :   262.406 MB/s
Random Read 512KB :   819.881 MB/s
Random Write 512KB :   171.112 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :    14.679 MB/s [  3583.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    20.717 MB/s [  5057.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     2.397 MB/s [   585.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :    14.802 MB/s [  3613.8 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [H: 5.7% (32.1/558.7 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/09/08 18:28:43
OS : Windows 7  SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)