The Areca ARC-1686-8I/8X PCIe Gen 4.0 Cost-Effective RAID Controller is built to deliver unprecedented performance, using only carefully selected, best-in-class components. These include a dual-core Broadcom SAS3908 processor, a PCIe Gen 4.0 bus and a three-mode ROC.
The controllers are 100% compatible with the Thunderbolt standard and work with external PCIe enclosures and with macOS and Windows.
Areca ARC-1686-8I SAS/SATA/NVMe RAID PCIe 4.0
Broadcom's powerful three-mode ROC engine
At the heart of the Areca ARC-1686-8I/8X controller is the extremely efficient Broadcom SAS3908 dual-core ARM A15 tri-mode ROC processor, ensuring the desired performance without effort. It provides PCIe Gen 4 NVMe, SAS 12Gb/s, SATA 6Gb/s storage interface and data protection security. Corruption in a software RAID array is considered to consume enormous computational bandwidth and memory on the host. ARC-1686-8I/8X hardware RAID relieves the host of parity generation and maximizes application processing performance.
Cost-effective 8-port PCIe Gen 4.0 RAID cards
The new generation of Areca ARC-1686-8I/8X controllers offers advanced technology ensuring increased performance and better data protection in the enterprise. They are designed with a 1.6 GHz dual-core ROC processor and a PCIe 4.0 interface for the most demanding database and IT applications. Based on the ARM A15 PCIe 4.0 x8 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip (ROC) controller, the cost-effective ARC-1686-8I/8X tri-mode RAID adapters can offer both PCIe Gen 4.0 host and 12Gb/s tri-mode storage interfaces SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe).
RAID functions
- RAID Level 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD
- Multiple RAID array selection
- Configurable strip size up to 1 MB
- Support for HDD firmware updates
- Online array roaming
- Online RAID level/stripe size migration
- Simultaneously expand capacity and migrate RAID levels online
- Online volume set growth
- Instant availability and initialization in the background
- Global and dedicated hot spare support
- Automatic detection and reconstruction of disks after adding/removing them
- Support for native SAS and SATA devices with 4K and 512 byte sectors
- UNMAP command support
- Supports SMART function
- Multi-pair SSD/HDD cloning function
- Automatic SSD Monitor Clone (AMC)
- SED support for drives that support hardware encryption
Key features of the ARC-1686-8i card
- Tri-mode interface on each disk port – 12 Gb/s SAS/SATA/ PCIe 4.0 Gen (NVMe)
- x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 host interface
- Hardware secure boot feature
- Universal Bay Management (UBM)
- Connector pinout compatible with SFF-9402
- SED support for drives that support hardware encryption
- Redundant flash image to ensure adapter availability
- Support for SAS tape devices and transport layer retries (TLR) for error handling
- RAID levels 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD
- Wide operating system support including Windows, Linux (open source), FreeBSD (open source) and Mac
