Areca Releases First 4-bay 3Gbps eSATA Host RAID Box

Cebit Hannover Germany.- Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and PCI-X/PCIe SAS or SATA ll RAID controllers with Intel RAID 6 inside, today announced that its 4-bayeSATA Host RAID Box (ARC-5020). The eSATA host port unleashes the power of 3Gbps and NCQ on the eSATA host port.

The 4-bay RAID box offers a truly innovative eSATA (3Gbps)/USB2.0 solution for use with your PC and Mac. Designed and leveraged with Areca’ existing high performance solution, this controller delivers high-capacity performance at the best of cost/performance value.With RAID technology, it allows one HDD failure without impact on the existing data and failed drive rebuild is transparent to the host. The Intelligent cooling continuously adapts to environmental conditions by automatically controlling the speed of the cooling fans. This super silent design, optimizing balance between noise reduction and necessary cooling, help the resellers to offer the cost effective storage solution to the end customers.

ARC-5020 hardware RAID box unleashes the power of 3Gbps performance and NCQ support on the eSATA host port. The eSATA port delivers in excess of 220 MB per second (MB/sec) sustained RAID 0 reads and over 210 MB/sec RAID 0 sequential writes. The result is superior overall performance compared to other 4 bay eSATA solution. High transfer rates make ARC-5020 well suited for audio/video application especially the rapidly growing demand from the Mac Video Editing markets. With the host SATA controller supported port multiplier function, both eSATA and USB2.0 host channel can support multiple volumes (up to 4) by Areca’s target mode multiplier emulation. The RAID controller provides RAID levels 0,1, 10, 3, 5, Single Disk or JBOD RAID configurations.Areca greater than 2TB support allows for very large volume set application in 64-bit environment such as data-mining and managing large databases.

Manual configuration and monitoring can be done through the LCD Control Panel, RS-232 and LAN port. The LCD Hot-Key supports one-step easy RAID configuration to simplify the firstly setup of RAID controller. The controller firmware also contains a browser-based McRAID storage manager that can access through the on board LAN port.