Areca ARC-1221x - Storage controller (RAID) - 8 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, 1E - PCI Express x8

by Areca

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B001O4J22S
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,661 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 18, 2008

Product Description

Areca is shipping the ARC-1221x external dual Mini-SAS to PCI-Express SATA RAID Controller. This eight channel SATA host adapter features an amazing number of RAID configurations. It supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10 or JBOD for maximum configuration flexibility. The ARC-1221x features a PCIe eight lane interface, an 800MHz Intel IOP341 I/O processor, 256MB of on-board DDR333 533 MHz SDRAM with ECC protection and an optimized RAID engine to support extreme RAID 6 performance. It features online RAID capacity expansion, RAID level migration, hot swap, global online spare, automatic failed drive rebuilding and background RAID rebuilding. The ARC-1221x supports a Command Line Interface (CLI) and includes a browser-based management tool for easy configuration. The controller provides system status indication through a HDD I2C enclosure connector, LCD connector, alarm buzzer and SMTP email notification. This eight channel SATA host adapter provides high performance and a large set of RAID features. The purpose of this article is to determine how the Areca ARC-1221x will perform with the Apple Mac Pro.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars The wrong item, August 23, 2011

By 

luli-s - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Areca ARC-1221x - Storage controller (RAID) - 8 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, 1E - PCI Express x8 (Personal Computers)

As the title indicates, I had orderd Areca ARC-1221x. Unfortunatly, what I actualy recieved is ARC-1222x which is entirly different device.
I have reported the mistake to the vendor, but until now there was no response from his side.Areca ARC-1221x - Storage controller (RAID) - 8 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, 1E - PCI Express x8

5.0 out of 5 stars Very fast and reliable, however it is pricey!, March 30, 2011

By 

D. Schwartz (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Areca ARC-1221x - Storage controller (RAID) - 8 Channel - SATA-300 low profile - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, 1E - PCI Express x8 (Personal Computers)

I use this 8 port SATA Areca 1221x raid controller in my Dell Poweredge T300 server with a quad core xeon 2.33 ghz, 12gb ram, windows 2008 server and dual gigabit ethernet ports on the motherboard (the broadcom network ports are configured in a load balanced configuration for the greatest possible network performance).

The card connects (with two infiniband cables) to an external enclosure filled with eight 3.5" Samsung 500 gb 7200 rpm drives. The drives are configured as a single raid 5 volume and yield about 3.5 terabytes of space after formatting. In this configuration I get about 500 megabytes per second read and write time using hdtach. Over the network I get about 60-70 megabytes per second transfers using an Optiplex 745 (quad core cpu 4gb ram) with windows 7 x64 as the client (using it's built in gig-e card). I believe that the optiplex 745's gigabit ethernet motherport based port does not use PCI Express lanes and thus better performance could be had with a more modern motherboard/pc that has an ethernet port which utilizes the motherboards pci-express lanes.

Management of the card is done through your web browser, additionally you can configure it by pressing a sequence of keys when booting up your machine. The interface is not pretty, but functional.

Overall this is a very high performance card that is both reliable and stable. Areca regularly updates the bios and drives to this card. At this point, the drivers and bios are very mature as this card has been available for a couple of years now.

My only complaint with the card is that it cost me over $600 to buy! However as they say, you get what you pay for.