On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 09:03:05PM +0200, Tom Laermans wrote: > 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. well, most BIOS interfaces nowadays are kind of graphical ones, and that is not the best idea for a headless server, the intel card was extremely annoying in this regard, as it even 'required' a mouse to be plugged in for bootup (without the bios stuff disabled, which took me some time to figure out :) webinterface doesn't sound like a good idea either, but I could live with that, but the question is, who provides the web interface? is that something you only get with the network enabled cards? if it isn't too much of a problem, I would be interested if you can backup the raid config to your filesystem, and if yes, how that backup actually looks like ... > > - 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. could you try that for me and let me know if and how it works? > > - 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 that was another problem I ran into with the intel card, it insisted to cut away a few hundred megabytes (which isn't such a big deal with 500GB/1TB disks), but I couldn't access existing disks that way and had to attach a separate controller for that purpose > 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 ;) no, this is not the intended setup, but it comes really handy when you want to migrate stuff or integrate existing setups slowly > > - 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 > =============================================================================== looks nice, does it provide command completion and/or command history? is the help sufficient to find your way around? > 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 all information helps and is appreciated, as I do not have a chance to test-drive one that easily thanks, Herbert > HTH, > Tom