arcmsr(4)

arcmsr4

Areca raid controller driver

Usage

To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

device pci device scbus device da device arcmsr

Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):

arcmsr_load="YES"

Overview

The arcmsr driver provides support for the Areca ARC-11xx, ARC-12xx, ARC-13xx, ARC-16xx and ARC-18xx series of SAS and SATA RAID controllers. These controllers feature RAID-0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10 and JBOD acceleration for up to 16 SATA drives. RAID level and stripe level migration, online capacity expansion, hot insertion/removal, automatic failover and rebuild, and SMART are also supported. Access to the arrays is provided via the SCSI CAM /dev/da? device nodes. A management interface is also present via the /dev/arcmsr? device node. Management tools for i386 and amd64 are available from Areca.

Hardware

The arcmsr driver supports the following Areca PCI-X/PCIe SATA/SAS/NVMe RAID host adapters:

  • ARC-1110

  • ARC-1120

  • ARC-1130

  • ARC-1160

  • ARC-1170

  • ARC-1110ML

  • ARC-1120ML

  • ARC-1130ML

  • ARC-1160ML

  • ARC-1200

  • ARC-1201

  • ARC-1203

  • ARC-1210

  • ARC-1212

  • ARC-1213

  • ARC-1214

  • ARC-1216

  • ARC-1220

  • ARC-1222

  • ARC-1223

  • ARC-1224

  • ARC-1226

  • ARC-1230

  • ARC-1231

  • ARC-1260

  • ARC-1261

  • ARC-1270

  • ARC-1280

  • ARC-1210ML

  • ARC-1220ML

  • ARC-1231ML

  • ARC-1261ML

  • ARC-1280ML

  • ARC-1380

  • ARC-1381

  • ARC-1680

  • ARC-1681

  • ARC-1880

  • ARC-1882

  • ARC-1883

  • ARC-1884

  • ARC-1886

Files

/dev/da?

Array block device

/dev/arcmsr?

Management interface

Releases

51 releases since FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE; the text changed 38 times.

  1. 5.4–5.5
  2. 6.0–6.1
  3. 6.2
  4. 6.3
  5. 6.4
  6. 7.0
  7. 7.1
  8. 7.2
  9. 7.3
  10. 7.4
  11. 8.0
  12. 8.1
  13. 8.2
  14. 8.3
  15. 8.4
  16. 9.0
  17. 9.1
  18. 9.2
  19. 9.3
  20. 10.0
  21. 10.1
  22. 10.2
  23. 10.3
  24. 10.4
  25. 11.0
  26. 11.1
  27. 11.2
  28. 11.3
  29. 11.4
  30. 12.0
  31. 12.1
  32. 12.2
  33. 12.3
  34. 12.4
  35. 13.0–13.2
  36. 13.3–14.4
  37. 14.5
  38. 15.0
  39. 15.1–16.0

History

The arcmsr driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.4.

Authors

The driver was written by Erich Chen ⟨[email protected]⟩.

Bugs

The driver has been tested on i386 and amd64. It likely requires additional work to function on big-endian architectures.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.