Acard's Small Business RAID Appliance

1U RAID Storage In A Box

The storage device's components comprise a solid 1U 19" rackmount case, a hardware RAID controller that supports four SATA hard drives and an UltraSCSI bridge solution for SCSI infrastructure connections. To facilitate maintenance tasks, the hard drives are inserted with aluminum frames that are easy to remove. Finally, the system offers a DDR DIMM socket in order to plug in a memory module of your choice, which can be used as cache memory for the RAID controller.

So, is the SATA-to-UltraSCSI solution fast enough or does it generate performance bottlenecks? To find out, we compared the ARS-3031 to Areca's ARC-1220 PCIe SATA II RAID controller, which represents a RAID solution that would offer a good fit for the storage needs of an existing server.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.