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Areca ARC-1220 No SMART attributes support


saiyan

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I tried the Direct I/O test program and none of the "specific methods" nor unsaved I/O worked for reading SMART attributes from hard drives connected to an old Areca ARC-1220 RAID controller.

 

FYI. Hard drives I have connected to ARC-1220 are all in JBOD mode.

 

Is it possible to add support for Areca RAID controller?

 

Thanks.

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Hi Drashna,

 

I checked the BIOS setting of my ARC-1220 card and it already has "HDD SMART Status Polling" enabled.

Using Areca's own ArcHttpProxyServer, I can use a web browser to connect to the RAID card and view SMART attributes.

 

Thanks.

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Okay, so the Pooling is enabled, you've checked with the DirectIO Test app which didn't get any results? 

Did you get a green check by SMART Attributes at all? Either with UnsafeDirectIO or not?

 

 

If not, then they're doing something special with their drivers, I think.

Are you using the manufacturer drivers? If so, did it have the option to use the generic windows drivers?  (run device manager, aka devmgmt.msc), find the adapter, check the properties and see if it lets you roll back.  If it does, try doing that and see if DirectIO Test will get the data.

 

If not, let us know.

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Hi Drashna,

 

I made sure the "Unsafe Direct I/O" option is checked and went through querying method on the list.

Only the following two items have green check mark next to them.  Everything else has red X marks.

 

 

1) General Section:   SSD

2) WMI Section: S.M.A.R.T. Statatus.

 

 

 

When I clicked on the "..." button for the SSD item with green check mark, I get the following information:

Version:
40
Model: Seagate ST4000DM000-1F21
Serial number:
W30045PN
Bus type: RAID
Command queuing: True
Device type: 0x00
Raw device properties: 0
Removable media:
False
Vendor ID: Seagate
Product ID: ST4000DM000-1F21
Product revision: R001

 

When I clieck on the "..." button for the WMI S.M.A.R.T Status, I get the following message:

PredictFailure: False

 

I am using the latest StorPort driver downloaded from Areca's web site.

 

I checked the device properties windows in the Device Manger and I see the "Roll Back Driver" button is greyed out probably because no generic driver existed.

 

In fact in every new Windows 7 or Server 2008 installation I have done, no Areca controller card I have ever used (including ARC-1220, ARC-1880i , ARC-1882i) have any generic driver available.

Hard drives connected to any Areca card will not be seen by Windows unless the proper Areca driver is installed.

 

Perhaps you guys can contact Areca Technology (areca.com.tw) for assistance.

 

It's not a high priority item on my list yet but it would be nice to see Areca cards supported since I purchase a license for Scanner a few days ago.. :)

 

Thanks.

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...

 

Perhaps you guys can contact Areca Technology (areca.com.tw) for assistance.

 

It's not a high priority item on my list yet but it would be nice to see Areca cards supported since I purchase a license for Scanner a few days ago.. :)

 

Thanks.

 

If none of the current Direct I/O methods work then they might be using a proprietary protocol. I'll try contacting them, and see if I can get any technical info on this.

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Ok, I've gotten a response (yes, I am a bit shocked).

 

This is what they said: "if you would like to inquiry smart status of each drive, you can use our api to send inquiry commands to specific drives. api is public which you can find in the support CD and our web site, the download page."

 

Based on what they're saying, it sounds like they have a proprietary and public API for querying the SMART data of individual drives. If so, this is great news. It means that we can certainly implement SMART support for their products.

 

While I don't have the support CD, I will check the web site's download page. If anyone can supply the said support CD, that might help a bit.

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Alex,

Thanks for contacting the vendor.

 

It's not an urgent feature for me at this time since I can always view the controller's own proxy web page for SMART attributes.

But it would be nice to see supports for Areca controller cards added.

 

Thanks.

Jason

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  • 9 months later...

It is definitely on the to-do list. However, it's not a top priority at the moment and may be a while before we take care of it as it will take a significant change to implement this, and there are other things we want to get done before releasing a newer version of StableBit Scanner.

 

I know that's not really what you want to hear, though.

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I'm sorry to hear that.

 

However, even if you don't get the SMART data, there are other benefits to running StableBit Scanner. Namely, the surface and file system scans. They may help identify a problem disk, just as surely as the SMART data, in fact. 

 

But I definitely do understand your situation.

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Thanks - I do concede that SMART data is somewhat unreliable as an indicator.  The Areca cli as the OP stated is pretty good in this regard already.

 

So let me explain my requirement. I've got 89 drives attached to my storage computer - this will grow in time.   24 x 4TB, 24 x 2TB, the rest of them 3 TB drives.  Given that volume and the fact that it isn't a 24x7 server at the moment means in my eyes the surface scans are limited value since the time taken to do some will be significant.  Maybe I need to look at the file scans more and see what that does - certainly it would be helpful to automatically record what files what was on what drive if one should fail rather than the DIR scrapes I do currently.

 

What I was hoping that the scanner would read the SMART data and if there was any "significant" change it would kick off a scan - so more targeted.  But without the SMART data this isn't going to work :)

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Wow, that's a lot of drives!

 

And don't get me wrong. SMART may not be a good idicator of the drive's health. But it is a good indicator of problems. (aka, it's the red flag that something is already wrong, as opposed to letting you know that something may go wrong soon).

So I absolutely understand wanting to have the SMART data from your drives.

 

And yes, the surface scans can take a while to do. There is an option to run them in parallel on the same controller which may speed that up (advanced config). If you are interested, let me know.

 

As for the SMART warnings kicking off a scan, that would definitely be a good idea.

 

 

And as I said, Alex has looked at the API to do this, and it is definitely possible. But it's going to require a serious overhaul. And we have a few projects we'd like to release sooner rather than later. So our priority is on those, instead of .... well basically rewriting Scanner.

I'm sorry that it adversely affects you in the meanwhile. But Alex does plan on adding the functionality.

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  • 7 months later...

Hello.  I just wanted to check and see if there is any update on this issue.  Like haileris I have a setup with a lot of drives (currently 72) and this functionality would be highly beneficial.

 

Currently using DrivePool and loving it on top of SnapRaid.

 

Thanks,

 

Vorpel

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Did some more looking and found feature request #96 for adding Areca card support.  I'm guessing that this feature will either not be implemented or will be in the distant future.

 

Guess I'll need to look at what smartmontools can do.

 

Thanks.

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  • 2 months later...

i also now have an areca card (needed more ports and threw out the highpoint card) and would like to see support for smart attributes in stablebit scanner. Been using scanner since 2011 and currently upgrading from a whs to ws2012r2 with drivepool (been reading passively on the forum for a couple of weeks, familiarizing myself with everything)

Update: HD Sentinel Pro can read all smart data for the card

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