Installing driver (Areca ARC-5030 controller)

[rwatt]

Greetings and happy holidays. I have a proNAS box (DN-503AH), 5 1TB drives. The controller is an Areca ARC-5030. freeNAS is not picking up the drives, neither is the motherboard but I can access and configure the drives through the web interface of the Areca controller(R-link RJ-45 port from controller). Areca's website has drivers and utilities but I'm clueless on how to install them and I can't serem to find a list of commands for shell or tw_cli. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

The Areca client is 'areca-cli' I believe. But I don't think it will work without the drivers installed anyway.

I just tried to look up that hardware and both Newegg and Amazon have zero reviews and discontinued. It looks like it may be IDE but both say "IDE SATA RAID RTL IDE SATA TO SATA II SUBSYSTEM" so it sounds like they're throwing keywords out there so you'll find a match even if you don't know what you are doing.

I looked at the Areca download webpage and the 5030 isn't even mentioned, nor could I find it under their products listing. My guess is that it is so old it may not be supported under FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

You could try installing FreeBSD 8.3 and see if the drives are detected. If they are put in a ticket at support.freenas.org and someone will add it at some point. If it doesn't work with FreeBSD 8.3 you could try 9.0. If it doesn't work with 8.3 or 9.0 I'd say your hardware will never be supported and if you are interested in using FreeNAS to look at using other(newer!) hardware.

 

[rwatt]

I also couldn't find the 5030 either, closest I could find was the 5033. It has an IDE port with a SATA adapter and straight SATA port.
I kept messing with it and some how got it to find the drives but now I have a nother issue. Thanks, I really appreciate the input