Taipei, Taiwan, March 16, 2005 -- Areca Technology Corporation, today announced the availability of a Microsoft®-certified WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Lab) driver for its PCI-X and PCI-Express series of high performance SATA ll RAID controllers. The entire line of SATA ll RAID controllers including the ARC-11XX, and ARC-12XX series are Microsoft WHQL certified for OEM design in qualifications and to ensure a higher standard of storage compatibility, reliability, availability, and interoperability on the Microsoft Windows system.
The Microsoft WHQL qualification indicates that the product has met the standards of Microsoft and that the product has been designed to work with the Windows Operating system. The procedure certifies hardware and driver through compatibility testing to improve the user experience by ensuring the product will be compatible when running Microsoft Windows.
A certified product may be included on Microsoft's “Hardware Compatibility List,” a resource often used by corporate IT departments when making purchasing decisions. Furthermore, Windows ME, 2000 XP and 2003 drivers are expected to have a digital certificate, which proves they have passed WHQL. The digital certificate earned is an encrypted code that is added to the driver files. The operating system reads this certificate to determine if the driver has passed WHQL certification. Without the WHQL certificate, the user is notified of ''potential compatibility issues'' when installing the device.
The Areca PCI-X and PCI-Express SATA RAID controller comes in 4-, 8-, 12-, and 16-port configurations, but it promises to be much faster and to boast other improvements than competitors, such as RAID 6, 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. It offers online Capacity Expansion, Volume Set Expansion, RAID Level Migration, Battery Backup Module, Redundant Flash Image and Enclosure Management services via a simple I 2C -like bus. All those features come from its field-proven external RAID controller.
|