Conclusion

The Areca ARC-1220 controller has turned in superb results in our today’s tests! The RAID5 and RAID0 arrays show excellent scalability of performance relative to the number of drives per array and are generally very fast. The controller keeps data secure in fault-tolerant arrays (RAID1, RAID5, RAID6 and RAID10) and, interestingly, the more fault-tolerant RAID6 has performed comparably to the four-disk RAID5 in most of the patterns. The mirroring arrays obviously use a special algorithm for optimized reading from a mirror, which greatly improves performance when processing random requests.

The controller’s excellent performance in FC-Test needs a separate mention. We’ve never yet seen a controller that would be as fast at processing real files as under synthetic (i.e. ideal) loads!

Fast cache, a high XOR processor frequency and lack of “optimizations” are the constituents of the success! Renowned manufacturers of RAID controllers can learn something from the young, yet very talented, Areca.