With up to six SSDs piggybacked on the board
New ARC-1886 Tri-Mode RAID Family from Areca
New ARC-1886 Tri-Mode RAID Controller with NVMe from Areca
Starline partner brings high-end controllers: Areca begins shipping the new ARC-1886 product family in January. The RAID controllers for the PCIe Gen 4.0 bus now also process NVMe drives in addition to SAS and SATA. The flagship even has six M.2 SSD slots onboard.
From Starline partner Areca come six brand new RAID controllers of the ARC-1886 family in January. They all shine with advanced hardware RAID based on PCIe Gen 4.0 technology. This makes them an extremely fast, reliable and ultra-compact solution for companies that require special hardware for high-speed data acquisition and processing.
- Tri-mode interface for SAS/SATA/Gen 4.0 PCIe (NVMe) on each drive port
- x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 host interface
- 8 GB DDR4-2666 cache – and optional Cache Backup Module (CBM)
- Supports Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, XenServer, unRAID and VMware
The two top models ARC-1886-6N2I and ARC-1886-4N8I, however, stand out from the crowd of the new RAID data protectors: With six and four M.2 NVMe slots with their own Tier 0 storage on board. The additional SAS/SATA ports can be configured in interaction, for example, so that the controller automatically swaps out the data to high-capacity SATA HDDs when the load is lower.
Effective Tri-Mode RAID Controller from the ARC-1886 Series
In this combination, the two M.2 candidates make an enterprise-grade performance and data protection strategy possible in the smallest of spaces – such as in a Mac Pro. And their massive I/O performance makes them ideal for database applications or streaming environments.
Just in case, all controllers of the ARC-1886 series can be equipped with a cache backup module. This protects the volatile data even in the event of a power failure. Additional security is provided by hardware-near encryption and the possibility to use a redundant flash image.
Its core – the Broadcom SAS3916 chip – takes RAID technology to a new level as a x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip controller: With 1.6 GHz clock and supported by 8GB DDR4-2666 memory, the RAID controllers provide the host with a continuous 12 Gbit/s SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) data stream.
Broad support and established tools
The ARC-1886 series supports a wide range of operating systems including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and VMware. In addition, it shines with successful system monitoring such as Enclosure Management and SNMP functions. They can also be conveniently administered via an out-of-band Ethernet port. With the McBIOS RAID Manager, the configuration and management of the RAID adapter is even quick and easy via hotkey. In addition to the GUI, Areca always offers the classic control variant via command lines in the CLI utility.
Availability
The RAID controllers from Areca presented here will be available from Starline in spring 2021. You can download this press release as a PDF here.
