Areca ARC-8050T2 Dual Thunderbolt 2.0 Ports for Host Interface and Daisy Chain 8-Bay Raid Subsystem

3 months of CONSTANT use so far and it's been great! Insanely fast, pretty damn quiet and so far perfectly reliable. I would give it a full 5 stars, but I do have to complain that it should've come with the battery installed instead of having to buy a $150 battery (in case it loses power in the middle of a write, it can keep the RAM alive for a few days until the power is restored). My only other complaint is the web software isn't very user friendly... but it's honestly such a solid product I can't complain about anything else.I'm running it with a 6 core 2014 Mac Pro and 24 gb's of ram.

Initial Review: Jan 7th, 2015Just got the box last night. Installed 8 6TB Western Digital RED NAS 5400RPM drives into the unit.The unit came with a heavy duty power cable, a very nice black flexible thunderbolt cable, and a grey network cable.Initial thoughts:1) On powerup, the fans on the unit are at max, so it can be a bit loud. This dies down to a low hum once the unit has finished POST and staggered disk power-on. Full post takes about 15-30 seconds, depending on your configuration, dhcp, etc.2) The raid/volume groups need to be initialized for use. The unit allows foreground and background initilization. I put the operation into the background, which allowed me to work on other tasks, like adding more volumes. Initialization is serial (volume by volume) and can take quite a while. You can start using the volumes, but performance will be better to let the initialization complete first. Took about 2-3 hours for 1TB raid6. The 34TB raid6 is taking quite a bit longer. Letting it complete init before I test the unit out.3) The server uses DHCP to pull an ip address. You can manage it with a web browser, which ROCKS. No software to install to get it working. The IP address is displayed on the front panel, so no guesswork. The network is for management only.4) Volumes show up almost immediately after you create them(even before they finish inititializing!).So far, the setup phase has been pretty painless. Will update this review once I've had a chance to actually use it with live data.Update: July 26th, 2016It's been a year and a half of using this array as my desktop's mass storage. Have a lightroom catalog of over 60K 24MP photos, some 100 hours of HD video content, serving the home theater's media, multiple laptops backing up to the time machine storage on the array, and various other normal tasks(software development and image editing).The array has continued to perform flawlessly. The array performs a self diagnostic and array check(complete scan) once a week to check for and fix any bitrot and I've hard rebooted the desktop a few times due to updates/bugs/etc. and the array just handles it without issue.The 8 x WD RED NAS 6TB drives I have in the array have also performed flawlessly and without incident.For folks who are looking for a home or small business solution for a good chunk of protected storage, this is a pretty great choice. I'm very happy with my investment and will update again in another 6mo to a year.

AMAZING!!! I have three of these bad boys now, going into my third year with the first one. Just can't say enough. SOOO easy to set up. Well, maybe the software isn't the most intuitive, but hey, if you have trouble with formatting a RAID, you probably should be letting someone else do it anyway. These things scream with speed. For the money, this is a great choice. And not ONE single even minor issue or failure in three years. Haven't even had to hot swap my spare drive. I'll be on my fourth soon enough.

I have purchased one of these products from Areca. I actually worked directly with the company. They have great products as long as you don't need support. Be aware that the manufacturer will not support the product. I had issues with mine and was emailing the manufacturer for a year and could not resolve. They have some of the worst support that I have dealt with. Personally I would never recommend Areca as a viable solution. Support is 90% of any product these days. A product is useless if the support does not back it up no matter how good it could be.

Best home machine RAID around. Been buying Areca for many years. Have three of these at home already

Fast, easy install. A little tricky but overall easy.

Excellent

It's been painless, which is pretty high praise actually. It just does what it's supposed to. It shuts down when I shutdown the Mac, and turns on when I turn the MP on. I haven't tried to stress test it. I'm just using it for large data storage and backups.Software is pretty easy to install and use, though it is very Web 1.0. I've had it hooked to a 2014 Mac Pro for two months, and haven't had any problems.I was worried that it might be loud, and it does have a noticeable sound, but it's not annoying - and I'm easily annoyed, soundwise. It's quieter than the fan I run most of the time on warm days.