Areca ARC-1882i Gen 3 PCIe 3.0 RAID Controller

Here we get our first look at the ARC-1882i V3 with PCIe 3.0 connectivity. The card uses an 8-lane PCIe slot, but your 16-lane slot will work fine as well. The card is actively cooled, but the small fan is actually quite quiet in my modestly cooled workstation. I would say that A/V professionals would not run into an issue with noise in their production environment.

There isn't much to see on this side of the card other than several surface mount components.

The dual SFF-8087 ports each carry 4-channels and are located on the back of the card. Personally I like the rear mounted ports more than I do when they come off the side of a card. The installation feels more organized this way.

Areca retained the out-of-bandwidth Ethernet port on the face of the ARC-1882i. This Ethernet port allows you to access the card from another machine without going through the operating system.

Under the heatsink we found an LSI SAS2208-J controller. This little piece of silicon is responsible for the new PCIe 3.0 spec. Unlike what we see with SSDs running the same flash processor units, the Areca and LSI products are quite a bit different since each use different firmware, software and are tuned a bit different.

On the card we found a definitive marking that distinguishes the Version 3.0 from the standard 1882i.