Areca ARC-1882i PCIe 3.0 RAID Controller Review

HD Tune Pro

Version and / or Patch Used: 4.00

Developer Homepage: http://www.efdsoftware.com

Product Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

Benchmark: measures the performance

Info: shows detailed information

Health: checks the health status by using SMART

Error Scan: scans the surface for errors

Temperature display

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

Going down the chart, we can see that the new PCIe 3.0 model is faster than the older PCIe 2.0 model when reading data sequentially across the array. Today we're testing in RAID 0, 5 and 6 with a stripe size in all three of 64, the ARC-1882i Version 3's default stripe size.

At this point, I should tell you that RAID 5 and RAID 6 are brutal on SSDs, RAID 6 more so than RAID 5. The drives take a beating when writing data and since we do not have TRIM on RAID 5 or 6 yet, you have to rely on background garbage collection to keep the drives running smoothly. While running benchmarks we do not have the privilege of long idle times for background garbage collection to take place and because of that, the arrays get "˜dirty' quickly.

That said, we could still look at the maximum and average write speeds and see that once again the increase in bandwidth to the controller card allows more performance to come from the SSDs. The bandwidth increase is what we are looking for here today and in the three tests we've conducted so far, we see the increase already.