Areca Cards

Hey Harm,
In my several months without Internet, I've fallen waaaay behind in my tech reading. What's your opinion of the I/O controllers on Areca cards? What to look for, what to avoid, that kind of thing. (3 drive RAID 3 planned.)

Hi Harm,
Before I ask for a perspective, I just want to thank you for all your efforts in sharing information with folks that are more novice such as myself. I have spent a lot of time in the various forums over the past 3 - 4 weeks considering a variety of perspectives related to the computer build that I am currently working on and all of your informative posts, as well as your responses to questions by others, have been EXTREMELY useful to me and the thought processes that I am currently going through. Thank you - very much!
I am formalizing my plan on the drive configuration for my new build and have decided to take the SSD plunge for the OS and Program files. Whereas I am going to buy the ASUS Rampage III MOBO (which offers SATA III), I plan to stick with Intel's X25-M G2 160GB SSD based on cost (and being a suitable size for OS/Programs) as compared with Crucial's SATA III 256 GB SSD at a couple of hundred dollars more. I'll move my old WD740 Raptor SATA drives, currently in a RAID 1 (MOBO) into the new system and use the new MOBO for a 140 GB RAID 0 scratch drive. For the media output/storage drive I have decided to invest in the Areca 1880ix-12 controller. My plans are to stand it up with a RAID 3 with 3 or 4 1 TB drives, likely Spinpoint F3s, thinking that while I will not use all the SATA III capabilities or all the 12 ports now, there will be ample capability for me to expand in the future with a SATA III-based RAID or with additional drives. (As a novice user, I don't think that I would ever exceed the limit of the board, but then again, neither did you!)
My question centers on whether to get the low profile (1880ixl-12) or the full-height (1880ix-12) controller. Looking at Areca's photo's http://www.areca.com.tw/support/photo_gallery.htm), the two cards appear somewhat different - on the low profile card there's a small fan; on the full-height card there are two large heat-dissipation/cooling fin assemblies. On the full-height board there's a large connector along the top edge that's not on the low-profile board - presumably this is some type of multi-connector or a "ganged" arrangement for individual drive connectors.
Any thoughts on:
(1) proposed drive structure, and
(2) full-height versus low-profile controller card?
In advance, thanks.
Bill

Similar Messages

Stardom drive with areca card mini-sas causing fcp problem

Hi everyone,
I have a stardom st8-U5 with mini-sas containing 8x wd black 2tb in raid6 connected to areca 1222x in my pcie slot
My macpro is early 2009 8 core with 8 gig ram installed running fcp studio3
i have nothing but problems ever since I upgraded to this stardom drive and I'm very much desperate for a solution. The drive is fast by itself but not when im editing in fcp...
When I first bought the drive, it was filled with 8 x 3tb hitachis and it the drive was very inconsistent. It would edit very fast in one time, and lag a few minutes later to the point where I have to restart my system to bring back the speed. The seller said that it may be the problem with the 3tb drives is not very compatible with the driver yet so we decided to do a drive swap with the mighty caviar blacks.
However, the problem persists.. It would be fine in one time and be very slow and choppy a few minutes later. It is generally fine when I'm editing in "low" quality RT but I don't go out and buy a 3000 dollars system to edit in "low" res...
When I skim through the footage in the timeline, it produces preview images very fast, but not during playback.
I'm editing AIC codec from dslr transcoded footage.
Areca support is nil.. they never replied my emails... stardom claims that the problem is not with their drive but rather with the card/fcp itself.. I somehow agree...
furthermore, I have run digital rebellion software, disc utility with no success..
ANY help will be hugely hugely appreciated.. thank you in advance
Santo

did you format the drives HFS+ when you set them up ?
most drives are supplied formatted NTFS

Using a Mac Pro w / Apple Internal Hardware RAID Card?

Anyone using a Mac Pro with a Apple Hardware RAID Card 2010?
( I have a 12 Core )
Is it worth the $600-700 ?
How much faster than the software RAID 0?
I see Hamm's RAID tips chart .. but it doesn't include such options .. plus it is based on a PC system.
Any tips would be great ..
I find many areas where the application is slow / unresponsive .. and I'm not sure where the bottleneck is ... Maybe the hardware RAID will solve it?
I'm really am impressed with CS5 .. it would be even better with some adjustments .. but I am absolutely disappointed with sluggish performance on my top-of-the-line Mac Pro 12 Core.
This is not what I expected for a $8,000 machine.
Some users says that the port of CS5 for the Mac has taken a back seat to the Windows version at Adobe.
I can't imagine that Adobe would not put 100% effort into Mac products.
Go Team!!!

I have a 2009 Mac Pro 3.33GHz Quad core w/ Apple RAID card, 16GB RAM from OWC, and Apple's Radeon HD 5870 GPU.
I have RAID 0 set across 3x1TB drives internally, and the standard 640GB drive for OSX and all program files. I set all video assets, renders, previews and such on the 3TB RAID.
This seems to work wonderfully. I built this system specifically to edit a feature film shot on P2 DVCProHD, and I've been impressed with how it handles it. This was all built prior to CS5, which took me by surprise. Had I known nVidia would become such a problem for Apple, I would have built a PC, but that's another story.
I just started a new project in CS5 on the same system, this time using H.264 video from my Nikon D7000, and so far, it seems to play just as nicely, despite not having hardware acceleration via CUDA technology. Yellow bars on top, even. I haven't had any problems with clips taking a long time to populate on the timeline or any of that, so perhaps the RAID card helps there.
All this aside, I've already decided to upgrade my RAID for another reason. Right now, my backup is performed via an eSATA-connected external drive through a PCI eSATA card. After every edit session, I dump everything on the RAID onto the external drive, and it goes much faster than the old FW800 transfer used to. I'm about to replace my Apple RAID card with an Areca card and set up a 4-bay RAID 3 via an SAS connection. This will allow for excellent data throughput while offering more security than my current RAID 0 / manual backup system, and free up the internal drives for backups, exports and render files.
I believe in hardware RAID, but I'm not as knowledgeable as Harm and others are about it. I had my Mac built to order with the Apple RAID card, so I have no experience using Premiere with a software RAID. Due to my smooth experience using it, I think it was worth it, but plenty of people say the Apple RAID card is rubbish, and to go with Areca or Atto cards. I didn't know about them until after I built my system, and even though it will cost a couple thousand to upgrade my RAID from this point, I expect to have an even better system than I already have.
I hope this helps, and feel free to ask any questions I didn't address.

Hard Drives and video card for new CS5 system

I've read through much of the threads in the hardware forums and find I still have questions. I am just beginning to learn how to edit and it is not a source of income for me at the moment. My sources will be from tapes from my Canon HV20 and at some point either a Panasonic GH2, Canon 60D or similar.
I have bought the following:
ASUS P6X58D-E motherboard
24 GB of Patriot Sector 7 DDR3 1333MHz memory (9-9-9-24)
Intel i7-950 3.06 GHz CPU
I plan to use Cineform NEO or maybe NEO HD to ingest my files.
I also have 4 Seagate 750GB 7200.11 hard drives I can use.
It seems like the best bang for the buck for a video card is a GTS 450 at about $100 because I can't find any data that indicates a GTX 460 or a GTX 570 would make any difference (see http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm)
As far as hard drives goes, Harm's article on creating separate storage makes sense to me. It seems like I could create a "4 drive" system quite easily (see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972). Given that I am not ready to spend moeny on an Areca card until I can develop my skills, I am wondering if I should get one of the new WD Velociraptor 600GB (SATA 6) drives as my system drive for about $280, a 150 GB (SATA 3) Velociraptor drive for about $100, or some other fast drive.
Given that my motherboard can support RAID, should I consider RAIDing the "D" drive or the "E and F" drives?
Is there any value to using an SSD drive for the "E" drive (page file and media cache) [see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972]? Microcenter has a 64GB drive for $100.
Thanks in advance.

Hi Harm,
First let me say, I didn't mean to exclude Bill Gehrke. I just didn't know what was what. Thank you for explaining that to me. Let me also say the you and Bill have a great site.
I have a question for you, in the tests I have run with my systems, I am not seeing any speed difference between the 450 and 480. Now granted, they are AMD processors and I know they don't have the SSE 4.1+. Here are my systems that I ran the tests on:
An AMD X4 Quad Core computer running at 2.9 Ghz with 12 gigs of RAM and a single Samsung 7200 rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive
An AMD X6 Six Core computer running at 3.2 Ghz with 12 gigs of RAM and a single Samsung 7200 rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive
Both computers were running the same version of the NVidia driver and all non-essential programs were disabled.
When I test the 450 and the 480 in the AMD X4 system, they are turning in pretty much the same level of performance, in that system.
The same holds true with the AMD X6, the 450 and 480 turn in virtually the same level of performance, in this system.
The AMD X6 with either the 450 or 480 does turn in a better performance over the AMD X4 with either video card.
The question.... Are you seeing result that are like this? Where using the exact same computer, turns in the same results with different video cards.
From the number of emails I get about the article, other have reported this to me also. I have had a few people who said when they did see a minor speed increase when they did switch between a 450 and a 480 and a couple who did see a good speed increase.
I am working on changing the article to reflect this and would really appreciate your input or Bills input on this.
I have looked at your benchmark chart and read through the result, but one thing that concerns me when reading some of the results is what programs do they have running in background, if any. And how is that effecting their performance. That is why I used the two systems I listed above to do the tests with. It gives me a controlled enviroment to do test the performance of the video cards in.
As a side note, when I tested the 450 and 480 cards in a friends Intel I7 system, again we didn't see any performance difference between the two video cards, but he did have some programs running in background which may have caused the perfornce results I got.
Best Regards
David Knarr

Is there any hope for Mac users with AMD D700 graphic cards trying to run Adobe Premiere 2014 CC?

Who wants to watch a grown man cry? I spent a small fortune on a shiny new mac with 64GB Ram and to quote Larry Jordan, "I could rocket to the moon with the power of this computer." I am running OSX (10.9.5) and have a 12 gig per channel ethernet Maxx Digtial Raid with Areca cards to support 6K footage. However, editing my first project in Premiere CC2014 (leaving FCP 7) has been nothing short of problematic. At first, it plays great but after 20 minutes of editing, speed changes, adding secondary shots etc it starts to play choppy, freeze on certain frames playing just audio and eventually crashes or it takes a minute to render.
I did every possible thing yesterday with Adobe and Apple support. I reinstalled the OS, I trashed 3rd party preferences, trashed Premiere preferences, set project settings from OpenCL to software only and I tried changing location of the Premiere Cache folder but nothing seems to work. Eventually the last Adobe support person said it was due to the AMD card and Adobe. He was emphatic that it was Apple's fault. Apple's support team said it Adobe's. Well after that, Im still stuck. Is anyone else experiencing this? Any pieces of the puzzle?
Is anyone else having the same experience?

The default for CPU Voltage is By CPU VID default for Adjust CPU VID is Startup which should be 1.4 volt. Since Cool'n'Quiet requires a driver to run and I also show low CPU VID in cmos it should be 1.4v but I tried with Cool'n'Quiet disabled and also tried setting CPU VID to 1.4 but have never made it to 1.4 I also tried setting it to 1.425 which is the next step and still read under 1.4.

Opinion of Areca ARC-1110 RAID Controller?

I'm planning on adding a RAID set to my computer. I'm looking for a good RAID card in the $200-300ish range. What is the opinion of this card? I've been reading that Areca is an excellent product, but I wasn't sure if there were any strong opinions or fineprint about this card.
Using an Asus Sabertooth X58 motherboard
Also, did I hear something about installing a card like this will hurt my graphics card performance, or was that my imagination? GPU is Nvidia Quadro 4000
Thanks,
Bryan

Bryan,
Like Harm stated, that particular Areca card is an old, outdated design. Unfortunately, most RAID cards under $500 do not improve editing performance sufficiently over an onboard software RAID to justify even their seemingly low cost. In other words, you will need to spend well over $1,000 (for the card by itself), plus the cost of any additional drives, in order to get a card that actually improves performance and reliability noticeably over onboard software RAID or an onboard aid0.
And the ARC-1110 that you're considering will not fit into any of the PCI-e slots at all. That's because that card is a PCI-x card which is not compatible at all with PCI-e but is compatible with legacy PCI slots. That means that on your particular Sabertooth X58 mobo, the only slot that you can use that card in is a legacy PCI slot, which is limited in maximum theoretical bandwidth to 133 MB/s. Unfortunately, modern hard drives (even single ones) can (and do) exceed that already, making the entire PCI-Legacy bus a bottleneck for any single modern hard drive. And forget about using the ARC-1110's RAID feature since it will still be limited by the PCI-Legacy bus (whiose maximum practical bandwidth is limited to only about 125 MB/s even with no other legacy PCI cards installed).
In other words, you are trying to buy the wrong RAID card for your particular system. You were trying to believe that PCI-x is the same as PCI-e when they are both totally different interfaces.

Cabling for 3rd Party RAID Card

OK, the drives on the Mac Pro plug into the motherboard. And the Mac Pro Raid card seems to access the drives through the motherboard:
"A new cableless connection and intuitive Apple software make it a snap to install this optional card."
So my question is, what if I want to use an Adaptec or other RAID card that has a series of internal SATA connectors along the top of the card? Can this card be used? How do I connect the drives? Are there plugs somewhere on the motherboard to get to the internal drives?
Or I am stuck with the $700 Mac Pro RAID card?

We use the areca raid card to connect to the internal drives. This is only one example of why Mac are worth the extra %25. On the very left hand side of the mother board is a Sata 8087 connector. I f you buy a raid card like the Areca and a extender, you can plug the four internal drive bays directly onto the connector of the Areca. We went a step further and added four more 1.5 TB drives to the optical drive bay and connect those to the second port of the Areca card. As we needed two times 4 drives for our solution, we have the boot drive connected to one of the spare sata connectors on the mother board.

AMD 700 FirePro Graphics Card

Who wants to watch a grown man cry? I spent a small fortune on a shiny new mac with 64GB Ram and to quote Larry Jordan, "I could rocket to the moon with the power of this computer." I am running OSX (10.9.5) and have a 12 gig per channel ethernet Maxx Digtial Raid with Areca cards to support 6K footage. However, editing my first project in Premiere CC2014 (leaving FCP 7) has been nothing short of problematic. At first, it plays great but after 20 minutes of editing, speed changes, adding secondary shots etc it starts to play choppy, freeze on certain frames playing just audio and eventually crashes or it takes a minute to render.
I did every possible thing yesterday with Adobe and Apple support. I reinstalled the OS, I trashed 3rd party preferences, trashed Premiere preferences, set project settings from OpenCL to software only and I tried changing location of the Premiere Cache folder but nothing seems to work. Eventually the last Adobe support person said it was due to the AMD card and Adobe. He was emphatic that it was Apple's fault. Apple's support team said it Adobe's. Well after that, Im still stuck. Is anyone else experiencing this? Any pieces of the puzzle?
Let me know.

Sadly, the Adobe apps are set for a much better utilization of nVidia's architecture & internal code than of AMD's. My builder is not pleased at this because he ... as a high-end gamer ... is quite aware of the high performance of many AMD cards in dealing with INTENSIVE video work involved in the top gaming apps. And frequently for much less moolah than the equivalent nVidia chipped card.
Go to the hardware forum, and the Tweaker's Page ... they've got stats on most of the "major" cards out there, and AMD cards are doing a bit better than they used to ... but still, the nVidia cards are where the action is within the Adobe sphere.
Neil

RAID Card - Current firmware limiting capacity?

We have tried using 1.5TB drives with the Mac Pro RAID card and had some serious reliability issues from the outset.
We're wondering if the firmware simply hasn't been designed to support capacities over the 1TB that Apple sells. Both Hitachi and Seagate currently limit their Enterprise class 7200rpm SATA drives to 1TB. Apple uses the Hitachi Ultrastar drives as far as I've seen so far.
I'd like to know from a good source (if not Apple) whether or not the firmware is to blame because 1.5TB Enterprise-class drives don't yet exist.

Same here....WD 1.5 TB drives..Created a single 3.7TB RAID5 set with a single volume. Appeared to be just fine...few days later drops a drive. Set the drive as a spare, it rebuilds. Corruption all over the place. Then it says the raid5 volume is unrecognized and goes into safe mode (ie. Read only). Funny thing is all the apple people (enterprise support, local stores, etc...) all said 1.5TB drives should work....ordering 1TB Hitachi's.
Come on apple...for a $700 raid card you can do better. I believe it is an Areca card (ARC-1212 maybe???)
Running it on a 8-core 2.8 w/ 10GB RAM, everything up to date...Raid card says:
Hardware Version 1.00
Firmware Version M-2.0.3.3
Expansion ROM 0018
Battery on Raid is fine and fully charged:
Firmware: 1.0d19

Bootable eSATA PCIe Card ?

Hello,
I have a Mac Pro 8 Cores
is there any one can suggest a good eSATA Card so I can connect my External Drive and be able to boot Windows from it (Boot Camp)?
something like this:
http://www.lacie.com/no/products/product.htm?pid=10839
http://www.lacie.com/no/products/product.htm?pid=11068
I have already Apple's Raid card with 4 WD Raptors (Raid0), and I need to use windows for a task (program) that is not exists on OSX and as most of you know I can not install Windows (Boot Camp) on my system because of Apple's RAID Card
I do not want to use VMware or any Virtualization!
Thank you

Hi,
The best way to use boot camp is with one of the internal Mac Pro bays. If you plan your system configuration for Boot Camp use with an internal Mac Pro bay it will always work.
Boot camp typically will not mount if a 3rd party controller is used. If you want to make life easier move boot camp to the internal Mac Pro bay.
From my tests, Boot camp Windows volumes will not boot if they are mounted on Silicon Image based cards, Sonnet cards, Areca cards or HighPoint cards. You might find another solution but the deck is stacked against you
Have fun!

Best internal SATA expansion card?

Two quick questions:
1. What is a good (and simple) PCI(e) expansion card to add 4 internal SATA connectors to the mother board? I had been using an Adaptec 1405 SAS-SATA card that doesn't want to work after my recent clean installation. During boot up, the Adaptec BIOS discovers the connected devices (that had been formatted and used with the same card till last Thursday, before the recent OS reinstallation) but the computer can't see them. BTW, I do not have a driver, but according to Adaptec, I do not need it if I do not want to connect boot disks to this card (that I never wanted to do anyway). Any advice?
2.(Not) completely unrelated: Windows 7 64-bit Pro fails restore operations (Error message: 0x80070005 - that's one reason why I had to do a complete reinstallation). My suspicion is BitDefender AV Pro 2011. There are several comments about this problem on the Internet, and not only with BD AV 2011 but with other AV software, also. Windows error message after the failed restore operation also mentions anti virus programs (even if they are disabled during the operation) as possible culprits. Any insight/advice?
Thanks for any comment, Laci.

Hi Bill (and others who could help...),
By the suggestions of this thread, I installed the Areca ARC-1300-4i storage controller a few weeks ago. Easily installed the driver, and everything showed up in the Device Manager, the Disk Management and in (My) Computer. (2x 2 TB HDDs and 2x LG optical drives are connected to it.) No problem with the HDDs, and no problem with reading from the optical drives (or playing movies, etc.).
However, I run into a big problem when I wanted to write (burn) on the optical drives! I was trying out some burner software but nothing seemed to work: Windows Explorer froze and I had to hard reboot the system a few times. I have used "Nero micro" before without any problem to read and write with the Adaptec expansion card (which went bad and I replaced with this Areca card).
I removed all the third party burner software (Revo is an excellent tool!), and tried Windows 7's native burning application: it also messed up Windows Explorer (hard reboot again...). When I connected one of the LG optical drives directly to the mother board's SATA 3.0 Gb/s port (see attachment): voil'a, everything works just fine.
I am contacting the Areca technical support tomorrow, and will report their input. Still, since it might be some deeper problem with the whole system, I would greatly appreciate if anybody would give me any idea what to try - short of reinstalling the operating system (again...) - which might be necessary after the many restore/restart operations during the Adaptec card replacement with the Areca card a few weeks ago.
Thank you,
Laci
P.S.
Adaptec is exchanging the bad Adaptec card with a brand new card (Adaptec 1405 SAS/SATA Controller), may be I will use that card after all...
The attached Intel Matrix Storage Consol shows the situation when one of the optical drive is directly connected to port 5 on the mother board.

Raid 5 or raid 0

Hi,
I had someone tell me that raid 5 is slow for my editing (or with video). Is this true? Will using a raid 0 be faster?

RAID 0 will be faster than RAID 5, but less safe. If one disk goes, you lose everything.
RAID 3 is actually the preferred choice for video editing, offering faster than RAID 5 performance as well as data security. As far as I know, only Areca cards still offer RAID 3 as an option.

Disk i/o question

As I believe our workflow will be I/O bound just as it is now, the new machine I build will have a raidcard setup for data storage. The work we do entails editing imageI up to 3--4GB max, no rendering. I haven't yet decided which sas/sata card and whether to use 600MB 10,000 sata drives or much more expensive and faster 15000 sas drives.
1. I see a number of you are using Areca card, why? Do they have better perfomance than equiv Adaptec or LSI cards?
2. Some of you are using raid 3 instead of raid 5, which is supported by a limited number of cards. Raid 3 is usually poor for random reads and writes but supposedly works well for large image files. I have no experience using raid 3.
3. I would prefer to use the 10000 sata drives due to price difference but since they are slower I am thinking about using an Intel SLC SSD drive as a temporary work space drive and then move the finished image to the raid array until burrning to dvd and shipping out to client. Altough some clients may have us do 100 + images at a time, once they have been shipped and comfirmed as good we will delete them after 30-60 days. The 64GB Intel is plenty large enough for this temporary workspace and we can refresh the drive periodically to maintain the write speed without redoing anything.
4. I haven't yet decided whether to include the OS and CS5 in the raid array or to use a separate OS 10000 disk or maybe a raid 1 mirror 10000 array using the onbord software raid. I don't want to use a large SSD fot the OS due to price/benefit cost and also don't want a raid 0 array for the OS drive as I don't want the downtime or hassle of rebuilding when it fails. The OS disk is mostly reads and few writes so I beleive a mirror will read almost as fast as a stripe and write about as fast as a single disk but if anyone has a different experience please comment.
5 I will probably use 8 disks for sata raid and 8 for sas along with the OS disk/disks and a SSD drive if beneficial.
Please comment and tell me what you don't like or do like and why.
Larry

Your information has me confused. You keep talking about images (imagel?) and say no encoding, I see nothing to convince me that we are talking about normal video editing. What is it that needs the high I/O.
There is nothing better for the highest speed RAID than the Areca controllers.
No comment
With the high end Areca controllers you can achieve the same high speed transfer rate with more 7200 rpm drives and save a lot of money and have lots more storage
You definitely do not want the OS and applications on the same drive. I would avoid using RAID of any sort on the boot drive. You do not need a large OS/applications drive .
Take a look the best Disk I/O results in PPBM5 Results for good disk systems

Should I disable RAID 0?

I need some advice on what to do with my present system. I will be using CS4 Prod Prem for editing HD, AVCHD, SD, etc. ...here's the issue -
I bought a custom built comp with -
Antec 902 Mid Tower ATX case
750Watt Corsair power supply w/140mm fan
2-120mm fans
ASUS P6T mobo
Core i7 920 CPU
Kingston V-Series SSD 128gb drive (for Win 7 + app's)
2- WD Caviar Black 1TB
12gb RAM (mushkin 4gbx3)
nVidia Quadro FX 1800 + Elemental Accelerator
+
I have 4 USB external drives, and one Firewire 800 drive attached as well. (Unfortunately these are 'mostly' maxed out, but I can still defrag.)
I had originally asked for the 2 WD Caviars to be set to RAID 0, but after I realized I would have no redundancy I asked for it just to be set up as two single drives. But, they kept it in RAID 0 . The RAID is controlled by the ASUS mobo. I am thinking a RAID 3, for now....eventually expanded to RAID 30 will be my best option.
I know I'll have to get more HDD's, but I need to know what would be my best option.....
1. Should I disable the RAID 0 until I can get more HDD's so I won't lose data? If so, how do I go about that....I would need to re-install Win 7 correct?
2. Or, should I just go ahead, get 2 more drives and go with a different RAID (x)?
3. If I have to get a RAID controller card for RAID 3, what's my cheapest/most reliable option? I just don't think I can swing the high end Areca cards right now.
4. If I go RAID 3, and want to expand to RAID 30, will I have to run an external RAID tower instead of internal discs?
5. If a drive goes down, how fast do I need to get the new drive in?
Lost, dazed and confused....please help!

1. Should I disable the RAID 0 until I can get more HDD's so I won't
lose data? If so, how do I go about that....I would need to re-install
Win 7 correct?
Win 7 and your programs are on the SSD, so there is no need to re-install Win7. To disable the current raid0, you have to know how it was setup. Was this done in the BIOS using the ICHR10 or the Marvell chip or was it done in software under Windows? Look in the user guide in section 4.4 for instructions on how to break out the raid to individual disks.
2. Or, should I just go ahead, get 2 more drives and go with a different RAID (x)?
Getting 2 more internals is always wise, since they are a lot faster than your current USB externals and these are already pretty full. I would make sure you get the identical model as your current WD Caviar Black. Also make sure that ACPI is disabled in the BIOS, because it can disrupt reliable operation of the Caviars in a raid. BTW, I'll explain later, but consider getting 3 Caviars instead of 2.
3. If I have to get a RAID controller card for RAID 3, what's my cheapest/most reliable option? I just don't think I can swing the high end Areca cards right now.
AFAIK Areca is the only controller card to offer Raid3. Also keep in mind that buying an Areca controller card is like buying a Vinten or Sachtler tripod and fluid head. Pretty expensive, but usually they last a lifetime. Now the Areca may not last a lifetime, but can certainly last a couple of PC generations.
4. If I go RAID 3, and want to expand to RAID 30, will I have to run an external RAID tower instead of internal discs?
Not at all, if your case is large enough. For instance in my case I currently have 2 BRD burners and 17 3.5" disks. If I want I can increase that to 2 BRD burners plus 21 3.5" disks of which 15 hot-swappable.
5. If a drive goes down, how fast do I need to get the new drive in?
As I said above, I suggest you get 3 WD CB disks. You can then configure them in a 4 disk raid5 array plus 1 hot-spare. The dilemma is that AFAIK neither the ICHR10 nor the Marvell support hot-spares, so you may need an Adaptec, Areca or 3Ware controller to get hot-spare support. If you don't have the budget for an Areca controller, then in the future you may find that the more affordable Adaptec or 3Ware card (or even Hightpoint or LSI) have no further use if the time comes for a raid3 card.
With a hot-spare in a raid5 when one disk fails, you can take your time with getting a new one (although with reduced security untill replacement). If one disk fails, you will have reduced performance for less than an hour, maybe only for minutes, untill the hot-spare kicks in. You can easily take a week or even two weeks to get a replacement disk if you can live with the reduced security of not having a hot-spare available anymore.
With hot-swappable drive cages you gain easy access to all your disks, like for instance the SuperMicro CSE-M35T, http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405
Hope this helps.

Which Build and what drives for a raid? One for Harm Maybe :)

Hi, I've been waiting to get an evga sr-2 but they are so hard to get a hold of at the moment I was starting to wonder whether I should go for something like this in the meantime. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-031-OB
I always wait longer and do big upgrades instead so am willing to wait another month if necessary to get my hands on an sr-2 but was looking at Harms Beast spec on the premiere pro benchmarks and noticed he gets pretty impressive results from a single i7
Just wondering if overclocked sr-2 running at 4.2Ghzplus is worth twice the money.
Also, No matter which board i end up with the first step will be using their onboard raid to run a raid 5 array with 6 discs. (they don't do raid 3)
Eventually I plan to get an areca card but don't know what drives to use. WD Re4's (2Tb) seem to be pretty good for raid and critical use for at £200 they are a lot more than WD blacks. Just wondering what to do for as it's alot of money especially if I decide to get an areca card and use raid 30?
Thanks, Michael.

Michael,
As you can see, Chris' top rank in the PPBM5 Benchmark reflects the enormous power of dual X5680's. Admitted, it is much more expensive than a similarly overclocked single i7-980X, like Studio North. However there is a distinct advantage of a dual Xeon system, in the sense that you will have 12 DIMM slots and can easily use the very affordable 2 GB sticks to get 24 GB, which saves a lot in comparison to 6 x 4GB sticks on a X58 mobo. Or you can expand memory to 48 GB should you desire so.
You may have seen this review already, but in case you missed it, look here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/08/17/evga-classified-sr-2-review/1
If you consider that there will be further improvements in multi-threading and in some exporter modules in CS Next, the advantage of more cores and more memory will probably increase over a 980X.
As for disks, the WD RE4's are a great choice. Depending on your storage requirements, and your timing for an Areca controller, it may make sense to start with the 1 TB version or the 1.5 TB version and then later add another 6 x 1 TB or 6 x 1.5 TB. That will give you a 12 disk array with the same gross capacity as 6 x 2 TB for approximately the same amount, but because of the larger array will give you better performance or in the case of 1.5 TB models even more storage capacity. I would advise against the Caviar Blacks because of the TLER issue.
Planning ahead for the Areca, you have to keep in mind a way to transfer your data from a mobo array to an Areca array. You may have to first create a new 6 disk array on the Areca, copy your data from the mobo array to the new Areca array, then move one disk at a time from the mobo to the Areca and define it first as a hot-spare and then expand the array. You have to do that for all the existing disks, but that way you have no problems in getting all your data on the new array intact. I probably would use a Raid3 or Raid5 with one hot-spare, so you end up with 11 x Raid3/5 plus one hot-spare, or a 12 x Raid6.
Hope this helps.

Areca Cards

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