Areca ARC-4036 6Gb/s SAS/SATA JBOD Enclosure Review- Enclosure Management

Lets now briefly cover the monitoring of the unit. We can use the GUI of an attached RAID/HBA controller to view the properties of the controller from your operating system. Here we are using the Areca ARCHTTP graphical user interface. This program is used to control the RAID controller and its various settings. One area that Areca is known for is a vast amount of user configurable parameters on their controllers so this is a feature-packed program for storage system management. Enabling the SES2 protocol will allow the user to monitor the enclosure and connected devices.

Here is a portion of the screen that will show the expander in the storage tree, and the devices that are currently connected to the device.

There is also a panel that allows the user to monitor the temperature of the device and the voltages that it is currently running, and the RPM of the fans.

And finally, a very useful tool to have is to be able to identify drives and enclosures. If there were to be a problem with a certain device, it would be hard to locate that individual device. This can be very maddening, especially when the user is using cables for direct connection. We have personally ran into this issue a number of times, and with direct connecting cables it can be a matter of removing devices until the correct one is found. The beauty of identification with a enclosure is that it is just a click away. Once the command is given in the GUI then all you have to do is look for the very bright flashing LED!

This would also be very useful when one is trying to identify the enclosure, if several were being used in a daisy chain scenario. For instance, all you do is select the correct enclosure, and then submit.

NEXT: TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

~ INTRODUCTION ~ CONCEPTS AND USAGE ~

~ UNBOXING ~ INTERNALS ~ CONNECTIVITY OPTIONS ~ CONNECTING DRIVES ~

~ ENCLOSURE MANAGEMENT ~ TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL ~

~ SANDISK PLIANT  RESULTS ~ PATRIOT WILDFIRE RESULTS ~

~ CONCLUSION ~

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