Anyone using the Areca 1212?

jva1601

Well-Known Member
Oct 19, 2010
65
1
48
I am prepping my supermicro server which has four 1TB WDC disks. If you have found the best setting for the Areca 1212 raid controller to use or have some recommendation please share it. I also have a question regarding disk initialization do I have to do this? I read online for RAID 10, there is no need. If I have to initialize the disks it will take about 30hrs or more to complete before I am able to use it. This particular Areca raid controller only has three initialization options Initialize disks, no initialization, and init for recovery.

My goal is to host a combination of KVM and OpenVZ guests.

These are the controller options I have chosen:
RAID 1+0
stripe size is 128kb
block size 512 bytes

Cache attribute - write-back
Taq Queuing - Enabled
Add Read Ahead Cache - Enabled
 
I am prepping my supermicro server which has four 1TB WDC disks. If you have found the best setting for the Areca 1212 raid controller to use or have some recommendation please share it. I also have a question regarding disk initialization do I have to do this? I read online for RAID 10, there is no need. If I have to initialize the disks it will take about 30hrs or more to complete before I am able to use it. This particular Areca raid controller only has three initialization options Initialize disks, no initialization, and init for recovery.

My goal is to host a combination of KVM and OpenVZ guests.

These are the controller options I have chosen:
RAID 1+0
stripe size is 128kb
block size 512 bytes

Cache attribute - write-back
Taq Queuing - Enabled
Add Read Ahead Cache - Enabled
Hi,
I have an ARC1210 on a test-system. Years ago with pve1.x (I think 1.4) also in production with raptor-disks in raid10.
On the production server we changed to ARC1222 with SAS-disks because of huge performance improvement.

My config on the testsystem is:
Code:
vsf info vol=1
Volume Set Information 
===========================================
Volume Set Name : ARC-1210-VOL#00 
Raid Set Name   : Raid Set # 00   
Volume Capacity : 600.0GB
SCSI Ch/Id/Lun  : 00/00/00
Raid Level      : Raid1+0
Stripe Size     : 64K
Member Disks    : 4
Cache Mode      : Write Back
Tagged Queuing  : Enabled
Volume State    : Normal
===========================================
and the performance:
Code:
pveperf /var/lib/vz
CPU BOGOMIPS:      32510.97
REGEX/SECOND:      1261609
HD SIZE:           78.74 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-data)
BUFFERED READS:    309.64 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 5.95 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND:     4006.30
DNS EXT:           188.96 ms
DNS INT:           0.56 ms
Udo
 
Thanks for sharing your results Udo!

These are the readings I get when running pveperf /var/lib/vz, the data location is using ext3. My bogomips is not as high when compared to yours but this is the hardware I have to work with. It is an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz, 4 cores.

CPU BOGOMIPS: 15999.02
REGEX/SECOND: 693347
HD SIZE: 1715.79 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-data)
BUFFERED READS: 276.50 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 14.39 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 2827.25
DNS EXT: 193.61 ms
DNS INT: 74.37 ms
 
Thanks for sharing your results Udo!

These are the readings I get when running pveperf /var/lib/vz, the data location is using ext3. My bogomips is not as high when compared to yours but this is the hardware I have to work with. It is an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz, 4 cores.

CPU BOGOMIPS: 15999.02
REGEX/SECOND: 693347
HD SIZE: 1715.79 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-data)
BUFFERED READS: 276.50 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 14.39 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 2827.25
DNS EXT: 193.61 ms
DNS INT: 74.37 ms
Hi,
14 ms seek time looks like an not real calm system - i guess the values are comparable to mine (you have also raid10?). I have ext3 also on /var/lib/vz.

Udo
 
Yes i have raid 10 but these are just sata disks.
Hi,
ok - my perfoutput is also with sata-disks (but fast raptor). 14ms is nevertheless not fast. just doing an pveperf on another testsystem (with slower disks/raidcontroller) and I got 8.6ms seek-time.
BTW, the difference to an ARC1222 with 4 SAS-disks in raid10:
Code:
pveperf /mnt/local_pve
CPU BOGOMIPS:      29474.23
REGEX/SECOND:      1485253
HD SIZE:           444.91 GB (/dev/mapper/pve_local-data)
BUFFERED READS:    414.45 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 5.48 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND:     4907.96
DNS EXT:           118.86 ms
DNS INT:           0.42 ms
Udo
 

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