The controller provided to us is based on a 133MHz PCI-X interface, but is now also available in an x8 PCI Express version. Our test card offers a total of eight serial ATA I ports. For an XOR unit, Areca relies on Intel's i80332 chip.

The ARC-1120 is a low-profile card with eight ports. Areca also offers 12 and 16 channel versions, the ARC-1130 and ARC-1160. These models have a higher profile, but offer an SO DIMM socket that can be used to expand the integrated 128 MB DDR333 cache almost as much as you like. Both models offer a port for the battery backup module.

With the Areca, a RAID array always consists of a RAID set and a volume set. The first is created when the desired drives are incorporated into a physical setup. On top of this the volume set is created, where the desired RAID level is chosen and the array is generated. However, one volume need not make use of all of the available storage; this allows several volume sets to be created per RAID set.