Areca Entry Level M.2 NVMe Hardware RAID Adapters - ARC-1686-2NOD

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.

Fault LED Stay on for Troubleshooting

On-board Supercapacitor keeps M.2 fault LED status to easy identify failed drive when ARC-1686 RAID adapter removes from the system PCIe slot.

Power Disable Feature (PWRDIS)

The ARC-1686 Power Disable feature provides a M.2 management capability to electrically power cycle a physical NVMe drive in order to perform a power on reset. This can be useful if a NVMe drive locks up for some reason, and you don’t want to send a technician to the physical RAID storage and manually "power down" and "power on" your system in order to power cycle the NVMe drive. Now, ARC-1686 can do this function automatically to check the drive is indeed failed or can be re-used. ARC-1686 Power Disable feature is similar as Power Disable Feature (PD) - disk cold boot management feature introduced with SATA 3.3 - February 2, 2016.

SED-Based Encryption

The ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter firmware Security Function, together with self-encrypting drives (SEDs), secures a data in the hard disks from unauthorized access or modification resulting from theft, loss or repurposing of drives. Protection is achieved by the SED hard drive that automatically and continu¬ously encrypts the data on the drive without any user interaction.

Multi-booting Capability

There are many advantages features for ARC-1686-xNOD RAID adapter uEFI support for more than one macOS version to reside on one Apple machine.

• Support a primary operating system and an alternate system that you use less frequently
• Allows a new operating system to configure all applications needed, and migrate data before removing the old operating system
• Useful in situations where different software applications need different operating systems
• Software developers needs to have multiple operating systems for development or testing purposes

The user would need to simply reboot the device and select the alternate option to switch from one version to others version.

Effective Management Tool

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

PCIe Bus

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.

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, 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.

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.

Highlights