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Areca Has Supported the ATA-8 Spec for WD Microcode Download |
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Taipei, Taiwan, November 21, 2007-- Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), today announced that their SAS and SATA ll RAID firmware version 1.43
Date: Feb 2007 (and later)
has supported the ATA-8 spec for microcode download, allowing customer using the Areca's entire family PCI-X and PCI-Express series of high performance SAS and SATA ll RAID controllers. This functuin will perform as a system level when update WD HDD's firmware without necessary removing any single drive and upgrade.
The current way to upgrade the HDD microcode is pull out the drives from the RAID system and insert the drives into a PC with SATA port. Either running under windows 2003, or maybe booting up with a DOS bootable CD to upgrade all the drives one by one while drives are in the unit. It takes much time to update the all RAID system drives firmware. If the system has the same mode HDDs, it will update all same modes HDD Microcode once. This function has co-worked with WDC and has verified on their latest WDC ATA-8 microcode download supported HDD. Areca has provided one utility for customer to make the WD firmware for readable by Areca firmware.
Here are the steps to update the HDD microcode that is same as our firmware upgrade.
1. Transfer WD firmware code to Areca firmware readable code.
2. Under "System Controls" menu selected "Upgrade Firmware"
3. Chose the firmware files that you provided back to us (locally stored on c:\)
4. Checked "confirm" box
The update is in progress will take 50 seconds. It is extremely important that the user cant not remove power or interrupt the update in progress or the drive can be rendered useless.
Areca PCI-X and PCI-Express SATA RAID controller comes in 4-, 8-, 12-, 16 and 24-port configurations, but it promises to be much faster and to boast other improvements than competitors, such as RAID 6, SAS and SATA ll support. The new controllers are designed to support the 64-bit computing applications. They support single volume set greater than 2TB via 64-bit LBAs on one controller. |
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About Areca Technology Corporation
Areca Technology Corporation designs and manufactures storage products for virtually all areas of the storage market including DAS, NAS, and SAN. All PCI, SCSI, and Fiber Disk Array Controllers support RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 1E or JBOD. The company also produces its own custom ASIC, a high-speed IDE controller, and a RAID 6 engine on their controllers to achieve high data throughput and availability. Areca has completely committed its highly skilled research and development effort to disk array technologies that yield the fastest performance, best reliability and lower cost points than competitive disk array solutions. Areca Technology is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. http://www.areca.com.tw |
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