Starline Introduces Areca ARC-1886 Tri-Mode SAS/SATA/Gen 4.0 PCIe NVMe RAID Controllers With M.2 NVMe Slots

Starline Computer GmbH anounced ARC-1886 tri-mode RAID family from Areca Technology Corp. with up to 6 SSDs piggy backed on the board

The company’s partner brings high-end controllers: Areca will start shipping the 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 has 6 M.2 SSD slots onboard.

Six brand RAID controllers from the ARC-1886 family are coming from the company in January. They all shine with hardware RAID technology based on PCIe Gen 4.0 technology. This makes them a fast, reliable and compact solution for companies that require special hardware for fast data acquisition and processing.

The 2 models ARC-1886-6N2I and ARC-1886-4N8I stand out among the RAID data protectors: With 6 and 4 M.2 NVMe slots, respectively, they have their own tier-0 storage practically on board. The additional SAS/SATA ports can, for example, be configured so that the controller automatically swaps the data to high-capacity SATA HDDs when the load is low.

In this combination, the 2 M.2 candidates make an enterprise-grade performance and data protection strategy possible in small space – for example in a Mac Pro. And their I/O performance also makes them 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.

At its heart – the Broadcom SAS3916 chip – the x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip controller takes RAID technology to a new level: clocked at 1.6GHz and supported by 8GB of DDR4-2666 memory, the RAID controllers provide the host with a continuous 12Gb SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) data stream.

Support and established tools
The ARC-1886 series supports a variety of OSs such as Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and VMware. In addition, it excels with system monitoring such as ‘Enclosure Management and SNMP’ functions. They can also be administered via an out-of-band Ethernet port. With the McBIOS RAID Manager, the configuration and administration of the RAID adapter can even be done quickly via hotkey. In addition to the GUI, Areca also offers the classic control variant via command lines in the CLI utility.

Highlights:

• Tri-mode interface for SAS/SATA/Gen 4.0 PCIe (NVMe) on each drive port

• x8 PCIe Gen 4,host interface

• 8GB DDR4-2666 cache

• Power failure protection through optional Cache Backup Module (CBM)

• RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 3, 5, 6, single disk or JBOD

• Capacity expansion, RAID level/stripe size migration

• Controller-based hardware encryption

• Redundant flash image for adapter availability

• SFF-9402 compliant connector pinout

• Supports Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, XenServer, unRAID and VMware

These RAID controllers will be available in spring 2021.