Areca ARC-1882i and Corsair Force GT 7 Drive SATA III RAID 0 Setup

By: Shawn Baker (more) | Storage Content | Posted: Sep 8, 2011 2:54 pm

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The Hardware

While there are indeed many parts to our testbed here today, we won't be getting into all the specifics here. Instead we'll just quickly cover them in the next page as we look at the testbed on a whole. Here we'll just look at the two main parts that make this setup possible.

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The first is my new beloved Corsair Force GT 240GB SATA III drives. I've been actually using them for the last couple of weeks while we organized a RAID card to arrive and they really just are an excellent running drive. When you install Windows on machines as often as I do, you do really appreciate the speed that's on offer here.

The Force GT line from Corsair is of course the flagship line and like any flagship product, there's of course quite a price tag associated with it. The drives we're using today will set you back a cool $479.99 US each. That brings the seven SSDs in at a nasty sounding $3,359.93 US. Ouch!

The drives sport the SandForce SF-2200 controller with 4KB Random Write up to 85,000 IOPS, Max Sequential Read up to 555MB/s and Max Sequential Write up to 525MB/s. These are some good numbers, but let's see what happens when we add more and more drives into the mix.

If that wasn't enough to make the Force GT from Corsair sound fast, the fact that it's red means it goes even faster, as it's a proven fact that red makes things go faster and that's not limited to SSD drives.

The other part to this SSD puzzle is of course the RAID card and the bad boy that will be making our seven Corsair Force GT drives run in RAID 0 harmony comes from Areca. The brand new ARC-1882i which isn't even listed on its own website yet is what we'll be using today.

This is the next generation Dual Core card from Areca and sports a Dual Core RAID-on-Chip 800MHz I/O Processor, has two SAS connectors, supports SATA III and SATA II drives, comes with 1GB of on-board DDR3 1333MHz DDR memory and uses a PCIe 2.0 8x interface.

Being so new, we don't have a price on this bad boy yet. We do know that the ARC-1880i comes in at $579.99 US. It's fairly safe to assume that with a pair of SAS to SATA cables as well, the ARC-1882i combined with our seven Corsair Force GT 240GB drives here today will set you back somewhere in the vicinity of $4,000 US.