New Storage Tech : PCIe SATA-II/300 RAID-5 from Areca and WD : Review

Quote: Areca also produces a more intriguing product, the ARC-1210, which is one of the first RAID controller cards to hit the market which utilizes a PCI Express interface. The PCIe x8 interface the card uses can provide nearly double the theoretical bandwidth (2.0 GB/s) compared to a top of the line 64-bit, 133 MHz PCI-X interface (1.06 GB/s), and over fifteen times more bandwidth compared to a typical 32-bit PCI slot (133 MB/s). While we've been promised PCI Express based peripherals (other than graphics cards) for over a year now, the Areca ARC-1210 is one of the first shipping implementations of a high-end PCIe RAID controller card. Obviously, we were curious to see how this card could perform against its PCI-X based variants. In order to really test out the cards, we decided we had to use Serial ATA-II class hard drives, so we grabbed four of the fastest SATA-II drives on the market, Western Digital's new SE16 400 GB drives. The new SE16 drives have (as the name implies) 16 MB of cache per drive, and they support the new Serial ATA-II/300 standard. We tested these disks out in a 1.6 TB RAID-0 configuration (to test raw speed) and in a 1.2 TB RAID-5 configuration (to test speed in a redundant configuration).

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