If you’re a system administrator and haven’t heard from Areca RAID controllers, you’ve probably been living under a rock somewhere. Throw out your 3wares, throw out your Adaptecs (if you’re happy with software RAID, keep it), insert Areca for instant fun. 🙂

I’ve been using them for quite a while now and I’m quite happy, mostly in RAID6 configurations, with great performance.

Some things can do with some improvement though…

– Web interface looks a bit dated, but hey, it works

– Expansion of volume set through the CLI didn’t work on my box. Areca says update the BIOS, but it’s at the latest, Areca says update your Linux driver, but hm. Maybe later 😉

– More on expansion: I expanded a volume set, and the status changed to "Initializing(15%)". INITIALIZING. Sounds terribly wrong and datalossy for an online expansion… luckily it was indeed expanding it, as it works fine now 😉 But still. It got very hot all of a sudden…

Luckily it all works grreat now, so as long as they keep this up they’ll always have my Euro’s 😉