Areca 1210 Help Please. Quick Update Help Please!

First, why do you have your boot and optical drives attached to the 1210? If your boot drive is not part of your RAID, leave it connected to a SATA port on your mobo and definitely connect your optical drive to the mobo.

Second, what RAID configuration (type and number of HDDs) do you have configured?

On the beeping. Did you consult the manual to disable the function or just silence it when it occured?

I have a 6 drive raid currently attached to the motherboard. I had a spare 1210 laying around so I put those two on the card instead of the jmicron ports. For the beeping I did disable it in the bios but it returns upon bootup.

Now I understand. Looking through the user manual for your RAID controller earlier, I am not sure why the 1210 isn't retaining the settings you are applying. Are you sure you are saving the config (no beep) on the 1210 itself?

If this system is booting from your boot drive (connected to the 1210) and your optical drive works properly, other than the beeping, what problem are you trying to solve?

Check the manufacturer website to see if there is a firmware or configuration tool update that may help with the config issue (beeping).

About the beeping, disabling it in the configuration options does not seem to work for this device, even when upgrading to the latest firmware. I actually have this RAID card and have had no success in disabling the beeping. I haven't looked into it further since it only beeps a couple of times during boot-up, which is fine.

Found this in the product manual (pg 77 of 181):

The “Mute The Alert Beeper” function item is used to control the
SATA RAID controller beeper. Select Yes option and press the
Enter key in the dialog box to turn the beeper off temporarily.
The beeper will still activate on the next event.

3.7.5.2 Alert Beeper Setting
The “Alert Beeper Setting” item is used to “Disabled or “Enable”
the SATA RAID controller alarm tone generator. Select “Disabled”
and press the Enter key in the dialog box to turn the beeper off.

This implies that muting is temporary, but disabling is more lasting. Soulbrotha80 indicates that this setting is temporary as well. Odd "feature".

Well I did end up removing the speaker completely. This is my first real raid card so this next question comes from the noob side. For setting up a pass through disk what parameters do I use? For SCSI Channel, ID, LUN, Cache mode and Tag Queuing?

You may need to experiment there based on your current config. You are going to have to look at how your other drives are configured in order to not create a conflict, for example you can't set your ID or LUN to be the same as one already assigned.

Does the card assign any values when you start the pass through disk process?

Are you currently booting the OS from the physical drive in question?

Unless you have data in your RAID that you can't back up elsewhere, I would recommend you move your boot drive and optical to the motherboard (SATA IDE or AHCI) and then reconfigure your RAIDs with the 1210 and the other ports on your motherboard. Just a suggestion to simplify your life later.

I don't believe there are any scsi id's assigned currently. Not that I know of or have seen. I want to have the drive connected to the card be able to be the OS boot drive. I was either thinking that but since the case is currently wired already I didn't want to have to rewire it.

Could I also just set the single disk in it's own raid 0? I have done this before on a nvidia 680i onboard raid. It worked just fine I think it just saw it as a single disk with no problem. I don't know how this card would handle it though?

I guess you could try it (stand alone RAID). Did you determine whether the 1210 will assign default values when you set up the pass through drive? If not, select the lowest values and proceed. Good luck!

I did not see it assign them automatically but I can try the lowest values thing. Now what would show me or indicate to me that there is a conflict?

From my review of the manual, you will have to look at the disk properties of each HDD attached to 1210. Not a very elegant solution, I know. Just appears to be how the card was designed.

I got the drive successfully configured as a pass through but now for the windows 7 x64 driver do I use scsi or storport?

I would assume that Win 7 would auto-detect the drive and install one of its default drivers. Have you tried that?

I had to install the drivers from the CD, as Windows 7 could not find a driver for the card. You'll want to use the SCSI drivers; that's what I did.

I was eventually able to get in contact with the people from areca and was advised to use the storport drivers with windows 7 x64. I think they said because storport is a newer driver protocol.

Good news. How is the overall system performance now that you have installed?

Good especially compared to the jmicron controller. Only issue I can't seem to overcome is when I choose the drive connected to the areca it seems to install fine only issue it that the system reserved part that windows 7 installs is on a completely different drive. This in turn causes it to not be bootable. It asks me if I want to let windows install that partition and then I hit OK and it automatically creates it on a separate drive with no choice for me.

I am sure you can move your boot manager to the drive of your choice. Here is a link that may prove useful to you:

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/71823-boo...

Good luck!

Thank you very much for that has been driving me crazy. Do you know off hand which download I need to monitor the status of the array from outside the firmware environment specifically a windows one? Would that be the http download I need?

I would think that Areca has something you can use at:
http://www.areca.com.tw/support/main.htm#b

There are some RAID utilities for Windows listed here. Good luck!

Also, Win 7's Disk Management application (Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management) should provide some information.