Areca ARC-1130 User Manual

25

The SATA RAID controller firmware is stored on the flash ROM and 

is executed by the I/O processor. The firmware can also be updat-

ed through the PCI-X/PCIe bus port or Ethernet port (if equipped) 

without the need to replace any hardware chips. During the con-

troller firmware upgrade flash process, it is possible for a problem 

to occur resulting in corruption of the controller firmware. With 

our Redundant Flash Image feature, the controller will revert back 

to the last known version of firmware and continue operating. 

This reduces the risk of system failure due to firmware crash.

 

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It 

is an array of multiple independent hard disk drives that provides 

high performance and fault tolerance. The SATA RAID control-

ler implements several levels of the Berkeley RAID technology. 

An appropriate RAID level is selected when the volume sets are 

defined or created. This decision should be based on the desired 

disk capacity, data availability (fault tolerance or redundancy), 

and disk performance. The following section discusses the RAID 

levels supported by the SATA RAID controller.

The SATA RAID controller makes the RAID implementation and 

the disks’ physical configuration transparent to the host operating 

system. This means that the host operating system drivers and 

software utilities are not affected, regardless of the RAID level 

selected. Correct installation of the disk array and the control-

ler requires a proper understanding of RAID technology and the 

concepts. 

RAID 0, also referred to as striping, writes stripes of data across 

multiple disk drives instead of just one disk drive. RAID 0 does 

not provide any data redundancy, but does offer the best high-

speed data throughput. RAID 0 breaks up data into smaller blocks 

and then writes a block to each drive in the array. Disk strip-

ing enhances performance because multiple drives are accessed