Herbert Poetzl wrote: > sounds good, I take it that you are using such cards > somewhere, (they are not readily available in Austria, > so I haven't had much personal contact with folks using > them, not to speak of hands-on experience), but I would > be interested in the following things: > Yes, I'm using them in several boxes at work (basically all servers bought since 2 years) and since a short while also in my home fileserver, with great pleasure. > - can I create a raid description for the controller > (externally) and upload that somehow? > i.e. to map a preexisting raid layout > (just curious, not terribly important) > Not that I could see, I haven't used the webinterface much, mainly the BIOS interface, which does not provide this possibility, I think neither will the webinterface. > - can I get access to the smart values for disk in > a hardware array? > Hm, I haven't really looked into it, the temperature values are available through the CLI (and in the bios, and via snmp if you have a network-enabled card) but the rest of the SMART values are not, I think you can get to them via the webinterface. > - are there any restrictions on the disks (e.g. size > or low level commands) when driving them in JBOD? > Size will not matter, I'm not sure which low level commands would be possible or not; I don't have a JBOD configured anymore to check. I think JBOD would be a waste of this controller though, assuming you don't mean spanning disks ;) > - what low level tools are available to manage and > monitor the arrays and disks? > Areca provides a CLI tool for Linux (cli32/cli64) available on their FTP site. Controllers List ---------------------------------------- Controller#01(PCI): ARC-1160 Current Controller: Controller#01 ---------------------------------------- CMD Description ========================================================== main Show Command Categories. set General Settings. rsf RaidSet Functions. (...) CLI> vsf info # Name Raid Name Level Capacity Ch/Id/Lun State =============================================================================== 1 Root Volume Khalid RAID Set Raid6 60.0GB 00/00/00 Normal 2 Storage Volume Khalid RAID Set Raid6 4100.0GB 00/00/01 Normal =============================================================================== etc > any input/experience there would be really appreciated > (currently looking at the ARC-1680 line) > I mainly use the 1110, 1160, 1260 but bios, linux driver & cli are identical for all, as are the features I think (except for the network port and the cpu speed) - apparently I don't know too much about them either based on this reply ;D HTH, Tom