Taipei, Taiwan, January 6, 2010-- Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and PCI-X/PCIe SAS or SATA ll RAID controllers with RAID 6 inside, today announced that its 8-bay 3Gbps eSATA, FireWire 800, iSCSI/AoE and USB2.0 multiple hosts compact RAID subsystem.

The ARC-5040 is the most complete 8-bay 3.0 Gbps SATA drive subsystem with RAID control capabilities. The ARC-5040 unleashes a truly innovative multiple hosts (with 3.0Gbps eSATA, FireWire 800, iSCSI/AoE and USB2.0) solution for both PC and Mac. The eSATA port delivers in excess of 220 MB per second (MB/sec) sustained RAID 0 reads and over 210 MB/sec RAID 0 sequential writes. High transfer rates make ARC-5040 well suited for audio/video application especially the rapidly growing demand from the Mac Video Editing markets. The Intelligent cooling continuously adapts to environmental conditions by automatically controlling the speed of the cooling fans. This super silent design, optimizing balance between noise reduction and necessary cooling, help the resellers to offer the cost effective storage solution to the end customers.

The ARC-5040 supports multiple host interfaces; eSATA, FireWire 800, iSCSI/AoE or UBS2.0 that can work currently at the same time without any limitation. With port multiplier SATA host, eSATA (3.0Gbps) host channel can support multiple volumes (up to 8). FireWire 800 can support up to 2 volumes. iSCSI/AoE and USB2.0 host channels can also support up to 16 volumes. iSCSI/AoE host will be available on Feb-2010. Up to 16 volumes can be created on each ARC-5040 RAID subsystem. Multiple host interfaces make ARC-5040 RAID subsystem well suited for professionals who need large capacity and exceptional performance with connectivity.

The ARC-5040 incorporates onboard high performance 400MHz storage processors and on-board 128MB DDR2-400 SDRAM memory to deliver true hardware RAID. It can be configured to RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 1E, 3, 5, 6, Single Disk or JBOD. The subsystem unit is the most cost-effective SATA disk drive RAID subsystem with completely integrated high-performance and data-protection capabilities, which meet the performance and features of a midrange storage product at an entry-level price.

Configuration and monitoring can be managed either through the LCD control panel, RS232 port or Ethernet port. The firmware also contains an embedded terminal emulation via the RS-232 port. The firmware-embedded Web Browser-based RAID manager allows local or remote to access it from any standard internet browser via a LAN port. The RAID subsystem also supports API library for customer to write its own monitor utility.