Areca Intros M.2 Gen 5 SSD HBA Powering 8 Drives Over x16 with a Bridge Chip

[btarunr]

Areca introduced the ARC-1689-8N, a unique M.2 NVMe RAID HBA that lets you pack up to eight M.2-2280 SSDs each with a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface, over the card's PCI-Express 5.0 x16 interface. Normally a card like this should only feature four M.2 slots, by segmenting the x16 interface to four x4 interfaces, but this card uses an active bridge chip, the Broadcom PEX89048. This chip is designed by the erstwhile PLX Technologies team. It has a 48-lane PCI-Express Gen 5 switching fabric that takes in 16 Gen 5 lanes, and puts out 32 Gen 5 lanes, making it possible for the ARC-1689-8N to have eight M.2 slots, each with full Gen 5 x4 wiring.

M.2 Gen 5 SSDs run hot, especially the ones with 12-14 GB/s sequential transfer rates and DRAM caches; and so the card uses an active fan-heatsink cooling solution consisting of an extruded aluminium heatsink with thermal pads over each M.2-2280 slot, and a pair of 40 mm fans ventilating the heatsink laterally. The card has a 6-pin PCIe power input, which when combined with the slot power, results in a 150 W power budget. A number of NVMe RAID options can be deployed, including 0, 1, 10, JBOD, or non-RAID; with the company claiming a peak sequential transfer rate for a RAID 0 volume of 60 GB/s. The card is 26.2 cm long, and is strictly 1 slot thick.



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[HBSound]

A fantastic option for a workstation if you want to keep all the information at the host computer/workstation.

 

[dgianstefani]

Mmmmm, now if only the consumer platforms that are starting to get insane numbers of cores, especially with Nova Lake and Zen 6, would start having more than 20-24 CPU attached Gen 5 PCIe.

Having ~50 core CPU options on platforms that will likely only support two channel memory and one GPU+one-two M.2 drives natively to the CPU is going to be a bit ridiculous. Here's hoping Gen 5 lanes go up in number, instead of a handful of them + the rest in Gen 4. I really hope it won't continue to be necessary to buy a $1k mobo and a (minimum of) $2k CPU to get more than 24 lanes that aren't bottlenecked by the chipset to CPU link.

 

[DragoonAethis]

Oof, per a distributor site it's EUR 1825 a pop.

 

[bonehead123]

Oof, per a distributor site it's EUR 1825 a pop.

Yep, even when they were Gen 4, that broadcom chip ain't cheap and never has been, and most likely never will be....

Plus this card is not really targeted at the gamr/homie user anyways, outside of those that have mo $$ than brains, and can afford & are wiling to buy a very high-end mobo/cpu & other parts that can support it.....

 

[Alan Smithee]

It only accepts 2280 drives (no power-protected drives) so it pretty much requires the ARC-1689-CBM supercapacitor add-on, which takes another slot and costs extra.