Areca RAID Controller Review

[ZipZ]

I am currently confused and angered with the THG Review on the ARECA ARC-1120 RAID Controller.

I ordered the ARC-1120 from TekramOnline.com, since I found out that the ARC-1120 will be distributed in the US by with the Tekram label.

The card works great, Easy installation and setup.

The specs on the Areca/Tekram card are so much better than 3ware, which is what caught my attention. I waited for a review to come out before buying the card. It finally did by, tweakers.net.
Here is the link: http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/525
The review results favored Areca over 3ware, RaidCore, and Highpoint.

Now, THG released there own review on the card, and THG results favor 3ware? What gives. With the specs Areca has, it should without a doubt be better than 3ware.

Here is the problem I have with the THG review. They compare the 3ware and Areca cards in I/O performance, which show 3ware with higher marks which can be very easily mis-leading.

But, in the Read, Write, Aceess time, interface performace, there is no 3ware comparison. This is what matters in the first place. Does Areca outperform 3ware that much that THG decided not to publish the comparison and make 3ware look better. I always thought THG had a unbiased standpoint, but it looks like they did not publish the comparison results of 3ware in the Read, write, performance, in fear of losing a major advertiser.

The Areca card outperforms 3ware in the maxumum troughtput results, how can THG still favor 3ware.

I am a very happy Areca/Tekram ARC-1120 user, and after testing it myself and using 3ware 9500 series cards before. I would definetly buy an Areca/Tekram card over 3ware.

THG, I think you need to publish the comparison results.

 

[Crashman]

I've never noticed Tom's skipping tests, but you've pointed out one I've missed.

If you REALLY want to see a site that promotes products rather than reviewing them, you can read PC Stats. As for the skipped test at Tom's, I'm not sure what they were doing.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[sjonnie]

With the specs Areca has, it should without a doubt be better than 3ware.

But depending on what you want to do, it's not. The I/O meter results clearly show the 3ware can handle multiple requests and higher queue lengths much better than any other card. The ARC can't handle anything over a queue length of 8, which is basically not suitable for a server that is getting thousands of I/O requests. That's simply due to the different technology used by 3ware to process I/O requests. Now, assuming you want to run a RAID5 fileserver, and I can't think why else you would need a RAID5 capable controller with 12 hard disks, then I/O processing is going to be the number 1 most important benchmark. Continuous R/W is virtually irrelevant for this application.

I am a very happy Areca/Tekram ARC-1120 user

Good!

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