Areca: ARC-1886-6N2I 6xM.2 Slots and 2x12Gb SAS/SATA Internal Ports NVMe Hardware RAID Adapter

Areca Technology Corporation announced the availability and shipping of the NVMe hardware RAID adapter: ARC-1886-6N2I to offer both 6xM.2 slots and 2x12Gb SAS/SATA internal ports.

Key features:

• PCIe 4.0 host interface, PCIe Gen4 x8 lanes at maximum transfer rate up to 128Gb/s

• Support up to 6xPCIe Gen4 M.2 slots

• Implemented 8GB 72-bit DDR4-2666 SDRAM providing hardware RAID assist engine for parity calculations

• Dynamically allocate storage 12Gb SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) to NVMe slot (1) and SATA/SAS ports

• Hardware-based RAID solution that supports RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5, 6,10, 50, 60, single disk and JBOD

• Supports up to 256 SATA or SAS devices using SAS expanders

• Firmware automatically backup from NVMe RAID to SAS/SATA RAID

• Adapter off module power loss protection (PLP) saves data issued without data loss at power fail for Non PLP NVMe drive

• CBM module or on-board battery(CR2032) to keep on M.2 LED status for troubleshooting

• Buzzer beeping for any of RAID adapter warning conditions.

NVMe performance gains for fast data
Based on the ARM A15 x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip (RoC) controller, the ARC-1886-6N2I RAID adapter raises the standard to higher performance levels with enhancements including a new high performance 1.6GHz dual core RoC processor, a DDR4-2666 memory, PCIe Gen 4.0 host and 12Gb SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) interface bus interconnection. The RAID adapter by default supports on-board 8GB of ECC DDR4-2666 SDRAM memory. The ARC-1886-6N2I, providing a fast, reliable, and compact solution for companies that need storage, is designed and featured in the fast data recording and processing.

The ARC-1886-6N2I dynamically allocates storage PCIe 4.0 lanes to NVMe slot1 and SAS/SATA ports to get performance – for professional media workstation and server environments designed to support high-speed data recording and processing. This RAID adapter can backup to 6 NVMe on one full high PCIe adapter, increasing the capacity/speed as more NVMes are added to it. It supports both 2280 and 22110 form factor drives and combines them on a tri-mode RAID adapter to maximize I/O performance for database applications and streaming digital media environments. Damage in a software RAID is considered as the consumption of massive computation and memory bandwidth on the host. The ARC-1886-6N2I hardware RAID relieves the parity gen burden from the host and maximizes application processing performance.

Guaranteed data protection
In the firm’s performance RAID solution, ARC-1886-6N2I brings PCIe NVMe to performance hardware RAID at an elevated throughput, high IO/s and a low latency. It supports the hardware RAID-6 engine and allows 2 devices failures without impacting the existing data and performance. The ARC-1886VN provides a dual disk arrays including a NVMe disk array and a SAS/SATA HDD array. The 6 PCs NVMe are for speed purpose (8K uncompressed video data editing, Gaming.. etc), then use 2 SAS/SATA HDD as storage area. The RAID firmware will have a special mode to preset the value and backup the data of M.2 NVMe disk array to the SAS/SATA port HDD array when the host workload level does not reach the preset value. This has the advantages of fast access to data by the NVMe disk and scores high reliability of storage on the HDD.

The ARC-1886-6N2I off module power loss protection (PLP) is optimized for datacenter environments. Its efficient PLP typically applies the capacitors on the NVMe SSD to provide hold-up power until the data is flushed from the NVMe internal DRAM to the NAND flash upon a power off or any failure condition occurrence. It utilizes the optional CBM module to provide off module hold-up power, eliminating the need for capacitors on the NVMe SSDs which helps reduce cost. The optional CBM module or on-board battery (CR2032) supporting M.2 slot will show a fault LED status and easily be identified as a failed drive when it is removed from the system PCIe slot. Controller-based hardware encryption manages any kinds of drives attached to ARC-1886-6N2I adapter without impacting the performance for security.

RAID management
The ARC-1886-6N2I RAID adapter supports OS including Windows, Linux (Open Source), FreeBSD (Open Source), Mac, VMware, along with system monitoring features such as enclosure management and SNMP function. The McBIOS RAID is a BIOS-based utility used to configure and manage RAID adapter via hot key at M/B BIOS boot-up screen. Without having to deploy an agent, you can also configure, deploy, update, and monitor the ARC-1886-6N2I, via the GUI or through CLI utility. Customers can launch the firmware browser-based McRAID GUI through on-board Ethernet port or ArcHttp proxy server. Additionally, Areca ArcSAP storage manager allows the user to scan multiple RAID units in the network and perform GUI management operations across multiple RAID units.

ARC-1886-6N2I is shipping in January 2021.