Areca RAID

[darkstar_35]

I have an Areca ARC-1260.
I have created a RAID 5 array 6 * 200 GB, after about 3 years of operation, one of the drives failed, then the entire array failed.
Apparently 4 other drives had bad sectors which become unrecoverable since one drive failed (the controller could no longer use the parity information to recover the data).
Obviously this is quite annoying (to say the least!) since this is an enterprise grade RAID controller (while I bought it mainly for performance, I expected some level of redundancy).
I have received no warning about the bad sectors in the drives whatsoever during the operation (if I had they would have been replaced).
Apparently there is a counter called "Media Error Counter" but there is no warning when it increases.
Areca claims that it would be too "annoying" to receive a notification when it increases.
Ever since, the controller started claiming that drives have failed (no reason why), even new drives, so from my point of view the controller may be fast but it is unreliable which is a critical issue from my point of view.
My question is, which SATA RAID controller has the best error reporting / recovery and is also fast.

 

[r_manic]

What do you think of Adaptec's higher-end offerings?

 

[Hovaucf]

LSI's gui reports everytime there is a smart error detected well before the drive fails.

 

[darkstar_35]

I checked the RAID adapters both from adapatec & LSI (as well as highpoint and 3ware) all seem to be based on two types of chipsets Marvell controller & Intel IOP CPU or a dual core RoC (not sure of the manufacturer), but in neither of the websites could I locate anything about how they behave in case of a disaster (will they start poping out drives out of the array for every small error even if it causes the array to fail, where is the raid data stored...), does anyone have personal experience with one of those controllers in such a case?

 

[raypp2]

I own an Areca ARC1130ML PCI- X and have experienced a similar problem. I was alerted that Drive 8 failed and I started a rebuild. About 10% of the way through, Drive 10 started getting read errors. When I attempted to clone Drive 10, I found that the drive had a great number of errors. Drive 8 did not have errors but was running very slow during a clone which leads me to believe it was also on its last leg.

Long story short, the Areca card did not provide any warning of a failing drive.