The ARC-1686 series presents the advanced hardware RAID technology in enhanced performance of using 2/4/6 Bays M.2 NVMe. The hardware RAID adapter support off module power loss protection (PLP), on-board hold up supercapacitor, and M.2 slot Power Disable feature for guaranteed data protection. This is designed in a 1.6 GHz dual-core ROC processor and PCIe Gen 4.0 host/device interface and supports RAID levels 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD.

Based on the Broadcom SAS3908/SAS3916 x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip (ROC) controller, the ARC-1686 entry-level RAID adapter raises the standard to higher performance levels with several enhancements including a new high performance 1.6 GHz dual core ROC processor, outstanding performance PCIe Gen 4.0 host and 12Gb/s SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) interface bus interconnection.

At the heart of ARC-1686-xNOD is the incredibly powerful Broadcom SAS3908/SAS3916 dual-core ARM A15 tri-mode ROC, giving effortless performance as desirable. It delivers storage interface PCIe Gen 4 NVMe, 12Gb/s SAS, 6Gb/s SATA, and the security of data protection. Damage in a software RAID is considered as the consumption of massive computation and memory bandwidth on the host. The ARC-1686-xNOD hardware RAID relieves the parity generation burden from the host and maximizes application processing performance.

To run the PCIe Gen 4.0 slots in Gen 4 speed, please must install the ROC which supports PCI Express 4.0. If you install the PCIe3.0 ROC, the PCI Express 4.0 slots will run only at Gen3 speed.

• Higher bit rate - 16.0GT/s

• Higher bandwidth per lane - 2GB/s

• Higher efficiency - 98.5% encoding efficiency

The ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter can operate in all three modes concurrently servicing NVMe, SAS or SATA drives that offers the operation of NVMe, SAS or SATA storage devices in a single RAID adapter. With a single ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter, system integrators can take full advantage of 6x PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 x2/x4 NVMe drives or 6Gb/s M.2 SATA SSD drives

An enterprise storages need to ensure data integrity in the event of power losses and system crashes. The Power Loss Protection (PLP) is a hardware and firmware solution on the ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter to ensure that the NVMe SSDs integrity is maintained should a power loss event occur.

Launch the web browser-based MRAID storage manager to check the power loss event.

(Breadcrumb-Trail: 'Information' > 'RAID Set Hierarchy' > 'Device Information' > 'Unsafe Shutdowns')

Areca provides more flexible management tools to manage and monitor ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter.

Lets you set up and manage RAID storage through In-band web browser manager and ArcSAP utility

You can configure in-band management for communication to travel over the PCIe bus path between a data host and ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter. In-band management uses a proxy agent HTTP management software (ArcHTTP) running on a data host to communicate with an ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter.

McRAID storage manager is firmware-based utility, which is accessible via the web browser installed on your operating system. The web browser-based McRAID storage manager is a HTML-based application, which utilizes the browser (Safari, IE and Mozilla etc) installed on your monitor station. It can be accessed through the in-band Thunderbolt bus and out of band Ethernet port. The in-band-Thunderbolt bus method can launch the web browser-based McRAID storage manager via ArcHTTP proxy server.