Adapters


Tri-Mode Cost Effective RAID Adapter

ARC-1686-8I/8X image

ARC-1686-8I/8X

(8 Ports PCIe Gen 4.0 Cost-Effective RAID Adapters)

Product Highlights


✵ Tri-mode interface at each drive ports-12Gb/s SAS/SATA/ Gen 4.0 PCIe (NVMe)

✵ x8 PCIe Gen 4.0 host interface

✵ Hardware secure boot ready

✵ Universal Bay Management (UBM) management

✵ SFF-9402 compliant connector pin-out

✵ SED support for hardware encryption capable drives

✵ Redundant flash image for adapter availability

✵ Support for SAS tape devices and transport layer retries (TLR) for error handling

✵ RAID levels 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD

✵ Broad operating support including Windows, Linux (open source), FreeBSD (open source) and Mac


Ultrafast Transfer Speed


Unprecedented Performance

ARC-1686-8I/8X PCIe Gen 4.0 Cost-Effective RAID Adapters is built to deliver unprecedented performance, using only carefully, best-in-class components. These include the dual core Broadcom SAS3908, PCIe Gen 4.0 and tri-mode ROC.


Powerful Broadcom Tri-mode ROC Engine

At the heart of ARC-1686-8I/8X is the incredibly powerful Broadcom SAS3908 dual-core ARM A15 tri-mode ROC, giving effortless performance as desirable. It delivers storage interface PCIe Gen 4 NVMe, 12Gb/s SAS, 6Gb/s SATA, and the security of data protection. Damage in a software RAID is considered as the consumption of massive computation and memory bandwidth on the host. The ARC-1686-8I/8X hardware RAID relieves the parity generation burden from the host and maximizes application processing performance.

Tri-mode ARM A15 ROC

High Bandwidth PCI-E 4.0 Support


To run the PCIe Gen 4.0 slots in Gen 4 speed, please must install the ROC which supports PCI Express 4.0. If you install the PCIe3.0 ROC, the PCI Express 4.0 slots will run only at Gen3 speed.

  • Higher bit rate - 16.0GT/s

  • Higher bandwidth per lane - 2GB/s

  • Higher efficiency - 98.5% encoding efficiency

PCI-E 4.0 support higher interconnect bandwidth

8 Ports PCIe Gen 4.0 Cost-Effective RAID Adapters


The new generation ARC-1686-8I/8X family offers advanced technology for increased performance and improved enterprise data protection. They were designed with 1.6 GHz dual core ROC processor and PCIe 4.0 interface for the most performance-hungry database and IT applications. Based on the ARM A15 PCIe 4.0 x8 to SAS/SATA/PCIe RAID on Chip (ROC) controller, the ARC-1686-8I/8X cost-effective tri-mode RAID adapters can offer both PCIe Gen 4.0 host and 12Gb/s SAS/SATA/PCIe (NVMe) tri-mode storage interfaces.

  8 Ports PCIe Gen 4.0 Cost-Effective RAID Adapters
ARC-1686-8I ARC-1686-8X
Form Factor LP-MD2 : 64.41(H) x 167.65(L) mm
I/O Processor Tri-Mode Dual Core ARM A15 1.6GHz ROC
Drive Connector 1 x SFF-8654 [x8] 2 x SFF-8644 [x4]
Drive Support 12Gb/s SAS, 6Gb/s SATA, Gen 4.0 PCIe (NVMe)
Max Devices Support 32
Management Port In-Band: PCIe
Enclosure Ready SGPIO, SES2 and UBM
Operating Voltage 12V
Power Consumption Approximately 10.2 Watts
RAID Levels 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Tri ple) or JBOD
Software Package Same as ARC-1886 Tri-Mode RAID Adapter

RAID Features


  • RAID level 0, 1 (Simple/Multi Mirroring), 10, Single Disk (Single/Dual/Triple) or JBOD
  • Multiple RAID selection
  • Configurable stripe size up to 1MB
  • Support HDD firmware update
  • Online array roaming
  • Online RAID level/stripe size migration
  • Online capacity expansion and RAID level migration simultane ously
  • Online volume set growth
  • Instant availability and background initialization
  • Support global and dedicated hot spare
  • Automatic drive insertion/removal detection and rebuilding
  • Support for native 4K and 512 byte sector SAS and SATA devices
  • Support UNMAP command
  • S.M.A.R.T. support
  • Multiple pairs SSD/HDD disk clone function
  • SSD automatic monitor clone (AMC)
  • SED support for hardware encryption capable drives
  • Operating Systems


  • Microsoft Windows
  • Red Hat Linux, Centos Linux, SUSE Linux, Fedora, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux
  • FreeBSD
  • XenServer
  • unRAID
  • macOS
  • Management Monitor


    McRAID Storage Manager

  • Web-based GUI management utility
  • Graphical-based management utility

  • McRAID Utility

  • Command-line interface
  • API code support
  • McBIOS Configuration Utility

  • Legacy configuration utility
  • Flashable BIOS support
  • Firmware built-in EFI Shell to launch configuration utility

  • Monitors/Notification

  • SNMP
  • SMTP
  • enclosure management (UBM, SES-2 and SGPIO) ready
  • Downloads


    File Version Date
    ARC-1686-8I/8X Specification 1.0 download icon 2022/06/10
    ARC-1686-8I/8X User Manual 1.2 download icon 2022/11/27
    ARC-1686-8I/8X Quick Installation Guide 1.0 download icon 2022/07/26
    CLI Utility User Manual 5.2 download icon 2022/01/04
    ArcSAP User Manual 4.2 2020/11/03
    File Version Date
    ARC-1686-8I/8X firmware 1.69 download icon 2023/12/15
    1. Add UEFI Shell virtual disk for UEFI BIOS to enter controller setup
    2. Fix NVME direct IO problem in win11/2022
    3. Add ARM UEFI BIOS support, 3 BIOS images (INT13+x64 UEFI+arm64 UEFI) included