One 10.0 Gbps USB 3.1 Port
- R0 Xfer Speed: 1046MB/S (read), 1055MB/S (Write)
- R5 Xfer Speed: 1046MB/S (read), 936MB/S (Write)

Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and Thunderbolt RAID storage, today announced the availability of an ARC-8050U3-6 10Gbps USB 3.1 compact tower RAID storage. With USB3.1 to PCIe 3.0 bridge and Areca existing high performance hardware RAID engine, ARC-8050U3-6 RAID box delivers the performance enhancement of USB 3.1 at the best of cost/performance value. The advancement of 10Gbps USB3.1 connectivity allows the ARC-8050U3-6 RAID storage to transfer end-to-end 10Gbps storage speed between the storage enclosure and the host system and fully backward compatible with USB 3.0/USB 2.0 interconnection.

The ARC-8050U3-6 is a 6-bay tower RAID storage which supports both USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 12Gb/s SAS interface. The USB 3.1 Gen 2 is a leading-edge technology which can make the bandwidth of USB 3.0 increase from 5Gbps to USB 3.1 with 10Gbps. Via ARC-8050U3-6, the interface can reach the R0 transfer speed to 1046MB/S in reading and 1055MB/S in writing and the R5 transfer speed to 1046MB/S in reading and 936MB/S in writing. It’s the most effective in both cost and performance consideration. The ARC-8050U3-6 also supports a battery backup option that protects all data in cache memory in the event of unexpected power outage. The controller-level ROC hardware encryption manages any kinds of drives attached to ARC-8050U3-6 without impacting the performance for higher levels of security.

The ARC-8050U3-6 is an OS independent, with no additional software or driver installation required, and is also used on any Thunderbolt™ 3 USB-C port. It supports RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 1E, 3, 5, 6, Single Disk or JBOD. Configuration and monitoring can be managed either through the LCD control panel or LAN port. The intelligent cooling continuously adapts to environmental conditions by automatically controlling the speed of the cooling fans for the rapid growing demand from the video editing markets. The ARC-850U3-6 is available immediately, shipping in September 2018.

Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and Thunderbolt RAID storage, today announced the availability of Linux driver for fully lines of Thunderbolt 3 ARC-8050T3 SAS/SATA RAID storage. Areca ARC-8050T3 RAID storages are already compatible with Windows PCs and Mac machine and now it is also compatible with Linux PCs.

Our linux driver in the kernel does not work with ARC-8050T3 hotplug. From Linux Raid driver source v1.40.00.05, it can support thunderbolt cable hotplug. This new driver source patch will be integrated directly into the Linux kernel to replace the existed kernel ArcMsr driver source, allowing future versions of Linux operating systems to default support Areca's entire family Thunderbolt RAID storage.

The source code patch for Areca's Linux drivers will be released as part of all new Linux kernels, and is also available on the company's web site at https://www.areca.com.tw. Being part of the standard Linux kernel means that Areca's new driver source code patch will be included in all the future Linux distributions, including Red Hat, SuSE, OpenLinux, Debian, and Ubuntu.

The Thunderbolt Linux code today consists of kernel and daemon components that extend the capabilities of firmware-based Thunderbolt systems. Linux kernel 4.13 or later has provided really strong Thunderbolt suspend/ resume function. The daemon software components operate in coordination with the upstream Thunderbolt kernel driver (found in v4.13) to provide the Thunderbolt functionalities. The daemon is not compatible with the old out-of-tree Thunderbolt kernel module. Users need to add the Thunderbolt daemon on the linux environment which is similar as Windows Thunderbolt driver for thunderbolt M/B to enable the thunderbolt functionalities. You need to upgrade your kernel to version v4.13.13 or higher for the daemon user-space components.

Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and Thunderbolt RAID controllers, today announced the enhanced configuration features in the new version firmware. This new enhanced features include RAID 1-Multi Mirroring and Mirrored Pass-Through Disks that delivery a truly innovative hardware triple disks mirror solution.

Usually RAID 1-Simple Mirroring uses just two disks in a mirror. A third disk in the mirror set would permit active double-redundancy like with RAID-6, but without the overhead of parity generation, so better performance at lower cost. You can set up a RAID 1-Multi Mirroring or Mirrored Pass Through three disks system so that it mirrors data onto three identical disks all mirrored. If you combine an SSD and HDDs in a Mirrored Pass-Through, RAID1-Simple Mirroring or RAID 1-Multi Mirroring hybrid solution, the reads are obtained from the SSD with SSD speed. You don’t need to use OS and/or Software to create the copies of your data across multiple drives.

RAID 1-Multi Mirroring is also known as “triple disk mirror”; data written on one disk drive is simultaneously written to another two disk drives. Read performance will be enhanced if the array controller can, in parallel, access all members of multi mirrored drives. During writes, there will be a minor performance penalty when compared to writing to a single disk. If one or two drive fails, all data (and software applications) are preserved on the healthy drive. RAID 1-Multi Mirroring writes three copies of everything, but its data storage capacity effective is 33.3%.

Pass-through disks are attached to a RAID controller and operate as if they were attached to a non-RAID controller. No RAID configuration structure is stored on these physical disks. This feature is primarily targeted for users moving physical disks containing data from non-RAID controllers to RAID controllers. The disk is available directly to the operating system as an individual disk. It is typically used on a system where the operating system is on a disk not controlled by the RAID controller firmware. A mirrored pass-through disk means controller will be regarded as the hard disk clone function, a host’s data will write simultaneously into dual or triple hard disks in the RAID controller. Triple pass-through means “save three copies of the data such that you can survive two disks failure and still have everything.”