Areca ARC-1689-8N 8x SSD NVMe M.2 PCIe 5.0 Hardware RAID adapter

The Areca ARC-1689-8N presents advanced hardware RAID technology with enhanced performance using 8 Bays Gen5 x4 M.2 NVMe. The hardware RAID adapter supports off module power loss protection (PLP), and ARC-1886-CBM provides features for guaranteed data protection. This system is designed with a high performance RAID engine and PCIe Gen 5.0 host/device interface, and supports AIC mode or hardware RAID levels 0, 1 (Simple/Multi-Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD, allowing customers to build high-bandwidth, low-latency, scalable, cost-effective and robust performance storage solutions for ML/AI, HPC and enterprise applications. The RAID adapter does not require a driver for operation or communication to attached NVMe drives. The RAID volumes are presented natively to the host and use the OS native NVMe drivers.

Unleash Extreme Performance

Unprecedented Performance

ARC-1689 PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 M.2 NVMe Hardware RAID adapter is built to deliver the unparalleled speed and data redundancy for your demanding workloads. The RAID adapter uses the PEX89048 PCIe 5.0 switch that provides a x16 PCIe 5.0, 32 GT/s interface to a host system with up to 32 PCIe 5.0 32 GT/s ports for NVMe device connection.

Powerful Broadcom PEX89048 Switch Chip Engine

At the heart of ARC-1689-8N is the incredibly powerful Broadcom PEX89048 PCIe switch chip and high-performance hardware RAID engine, giving effortless performance as desirable. It delivers storage interface PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe, 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-1689 hardware RAID relieves the parity generation burden from the host and maximizes application processing performance.

High Bandwidth PCIe 5.0 Support

ARC-1689-8N supports PCIe Gen 5.0 X16, enabling extremely very high data bandwidth. This is critical for applications that demand significant bandwidth, such as ML/AI, HPC, and high-performance storage.  It is designed to reduce latency, which is essential for real-time applications.

Professional Storage Connectivity

Comparing storage with SAS and SATA interface, ARC-1689-8N delivers ultra-high performance M.2 NVMe storage devices on a single PCIe Gen5 x16 slot. With a single ARC-1689-8N RAID adapter, system integrators can take full advantage of 8x PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 M.2 NVMe drives.

SED-Based Encryption

The ARC-1689-8N RAID adapter firmware Security Function, together with self-encrypting drives (SEDs), secures a data in the NVMe drives from unauthorized access or modification resulting from theft, loss or repurposing of drives. Protection is achieved by the SED hard drive that automatically and continuously encrypts the data on the drive without any user interaction. Local key management in the controller is designed to protect data from security breaches with minimal cost and complexity. User can use ARC-1689-8N API code to design its own key management utility. It supports 128- and 256-bit encryption keys using AES (a key size of 128, or 256 bits), or password (a variable key size).

UEFI Secure Boot Capability

The ARC-1689 NVMe RAID adapter supports the system's UEFI Secure Boot function. Secure Boot is a security feature that prevents malicious software from loading during startup. As a security standard, UEFI Secure Boot ensures that only trusted software is executed at boot, protecting against attacks that modify system firmware or bootloaders

In-Box (Native) NVMe Driver

The ARC-1689 NVMe RAID adapter goes with any standard Windows (10 or above), Linux(Kernel 3.10 or above), FreeBSD or VMware inbox NVMe drivers. You do not need a special driver to install the OS or data on the ARC-1689. In-box driver is a native driver that is supplied with the Operating System.

Effective Management Tool

Areca provides more flexible management tools to manage and monitor ARC-1689-8N 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-1689-8N RAID adapter. In-band management uses a proxy agent HTTP management software (ArcHTTP) running on a data host to communicate with an ARC-1689-8N RAID adapter.

Web Browser-Based Management

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, Edge and Mozilla etc) installed on your monitor station. It can be accessed through the in-band PCIe bus. The in- band PCIe bus method can launch the web browser-based McRAID storage manager via ArcHTTP proxy server.

User-Friendly Graphical-Based Management

Areca Single Admin Portal (ArcSAP) quick manager is an alternative graphical-based device management program specifically designed for use in managing and configuring RAID unit implemented using any of Areca RAID controllers. ArcSAP quick manager can scan for multiple RAID units in the local and remote systems and provide an effective mechanism to configure your RAID units.

Benchmark

Actual data rates may vary depending on operating environment, RAID mode, RAID configuration, NVMe model and NVMe performance. The best performance is installed the PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMes and connect the ARC-1689-8N to a computer that supports PCIe Gen 5.0 X16 slot. Below is the test result on the new AMD.

Tech specification

• Model: ARC-1689-8N H/W RAID Adapter
• Host Interfejs: PCIe Gen5 x16 Lanes
• PCIe Switch Chip: PLX89048 Gen5 48 lanes /high-performance H/W RAID engine
• Device Connector: 8x M.2 Connector
• Device Interface: PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 (NVMe)
• Max NVMe Support: Up to 4x 2280 FF and 4x 22110 FF
• RAID Level: 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOF
• Power Loss Protection (PLP): Yes (need to install ARC-1689-CBM)
• Device Driver: In-box (Native) NVMe Driver
• Power Consumption: Approximately 14 Watts (without M.2 drive)