INTRODUCTION
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1. Introduction
This section presents a brief overview of the 6Gb/s SAS RAID con-
troller, ARC-1215-4x/ARC-1225-8x (PCIe 3.0 x8 external 6Gb/s SAS/
SATA RAID controller), ARC-1215-4i/ARC-1225-8i (PCIe 3.0 x8 internal
6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID controllers).
1.1 Overview
SAS 2.0 is designed for much higher speed data transfer than
previous 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-
1215-4i/ARC-1225-8i support directly attach 4/8 SAS ports via
1/2 internal SFF-8087 connector. The ARC-1215-4x/ARC-1225-8x
support directly attach 4/8 SAS ports via 1/2 external SFF-8088
connector. Each port on the SAS controllers supports SAS and/
or SATA devices. Since there is no expander support on those
boards, this can meet the customer inquiry SAS solution (using
same enclosure) to replace SATA solution. The ARC-1215-4i/4x and
ARC-1225-8i/8x RAID controllers only support directly attach to
4/8 SAS/SATA drives without supporting the expand function. The
ARC-12x5 series default support 1GB on board ECC DDR3-1333
SDRAM memory.
The ARC-12x5-4i/8i RAID controllers are low-profile PCIe cards,
ideal for 1U and 2U rack-mount systems without needing the ex-
pansion capability. 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
3.0 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 dual core ROC Processor, a DDR3-1333 memory
architecture and high performance PCIe 3.0 x8 lane host interface
bus interconnection. The low profile controllers by default support
