Areca ARC-4036 6Gb/s SAS/SATA JBOD Enclosure Review – Areca, LSI, Sandisk and Patriot Perform!

Paul Alcorn July 21, 2011 Leave a comment

The storage industry is shifting from 3Gb/s devices to the new 6Gb/s specification which has been a boon to manufacturers as new devices are needed to handle the new, faster devices that 6Gb/s enables.

The 3Gb/s specification reigned for roughly five years which allowed user speeds up to 300 MB/s. With the advent of “disruptive” technologies like SSD devices, the limits of 3Gb/s have been pushed back faster than expected.

Now with devices that are able to saturate the specification, 6Gb/s and its 600 MB/s speeds could not have been integrated in a more timely and appropriate manner.

As an added bonus, the specification is backwards compatible with the existing 3Gb/s specification, allowing users to upgrade the different portions of their storage subsystems at their leisure. With SAS offering compatibility with SATA 6Gb/s as well, the choice to upgrade is definitely one that will afford many levels of storage devices to be used.

The rush to manufacture these devices will capitalize on the speeds of the new 6Gb/s connectivity and Areca comes forward with its premium line of enclosures to fully utilize the possibilities of this emerging technology.

Areca, a company known to cater to enthusiasts and enterprise users alike, has a very solid track record in both the RAID controller arena and the enclosure market. Today we are going to look at Arecas latest offering, the ARC-4036, a JBOD/Expander Box that allows for maximum performance in a nice compact unit.

SPECIFICATIONS

The unit can hold either SAS or SATA devices:

¢ Up to 8 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SAS hot-plug hard drives (6.0 Gb/s) at speeds of 7.2K, 10K or 15K rpm SATA hard drives
¢ Up to 8 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA hot-plug hard drives (6.0 Gb/s) at speeds of 7.2K or 10K rpm
¢ Expander board: 1 module
¢ Sensors: 1 sensor on the expander board Controller Back-Panel Connectors
Backplane Board Connectors
¢ 8 SAS hard-drive connectors
¢ 1 Power supply connector
¢ 2 Cooling fan module connectors
¢ 1 Sets of expander board connector
SAS connectors (per expander board)
¢ 2 SAS “Host In” connector for connection to the host
¢ 2 SAS “Expansion Out” connector for expansion to an additional JBOD enclosure
Serial connector: 1 6-pin UART RJ-11 connector
LED Indicators:
¢ 1 Blue single-color activity LED per drive
¢ 1 Two-color LED status indicator per drive
Expander board: 2 One-color LED status indicators for each SAS host port, one for SAS host port link and one for the activity status
¢ 2 One-color LED status indicators for each SAS expansion port, one for SAS expansion port link and one for the activity state
Power Supply:
¢ Wattage 220 W maximum continuous;
¢ Voltage 90“256 V rated
¢ Frequency 50“60 Hz
¢ Amperage +12V/16A, +5V/16A, +3.3V/14A
Dimensions:
¢ Height 302 mm
¢ Width 146 mm
¢ Depth 290 mm
¢ Weight 14.9lbs/6.8 kg (without disk)