Introduction; Overview - Areca ARC-1880 Series User Manual

INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction
This section presents a brief overview of the 6Gb/s SAS RAID control-
ler, ARC-1880 series. (PCIe 2.0 to 6Gb/s SAS RAID controllers)

1.1 Overview

SAS 2.0 is designed for much higher speed data transfer than pre-
vious available and backward compatibility with SAS 1.0. The
6Gb/s SAS interface supports both 6Gb/s and 3Gb/s SAS/
SATA disk drives for data-intensive applications and 6Gb/s or
3Gb/s SATA drives for low-cost bulk storage of reference data.
The ARC-1880 family includes 8-port external model as well as
12/16/24 internal ports with additional 4 external ports. The ARC-
1880LP/1880i/1880x support eight 6Gb/s SAS ports via one inter-
nal & one external/two internal/two external min SAS connector.
The ARC-1880ix-12/16/24 or ARC-1880ixl-12 attaches directly to
SATA/SAS midplanes with 3/4/6 SFF-8087 internal connector or in-
crease capacity using one additional SFF-8088 external connector.
When used with 6Gb/s SAS expanders, the controller can provide
up to (128) devices through one or more 6Gb/s SAS JBODs, mak-
ing it an ideal solution for enterprise-class storage applications that
called for maximum configuration flexibility.
ARC-1880LP/1880i/1880x/1880ixl-8/1880ixl-12 6Gb/s RAID con-
trollers are low-profile PCI cards, ideal for 1U and 2U rack-mount
systems. These controllers utilize the same RAID kernel that has
been field-proven in existing external RAID controller products,
allowing Areca to quickly bring stable and reliable PCIe 2.0 6Gb/s
SAS RAID controllers to the market.
Unparalleled Performance
The 6Gb/s SAS RAID controllers raise the standard to higher per-
formance levels with several enhancements including new high
performance ROC Processor, a DDR2-800 memory architecture and
high performance PCIe 2.0 x8 lane host interface bus interconnec-
tion. The low profile controllers by default support on-board 512MB
of ECC DDR2-800 SDRAM memory. The ARC-1880ix-12/16/24
controllers each include one 240-pin DIMM socket with default 1GB
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