Microchip Unveils Bottleneck-Busting RAID Storage Accelerator Cards
Microchip recently introduced the Adaptec SmartRAID 4300 series of NVMe RAID storage accelerators.
The Adaptec SmartRAID 4300 series.
Designed to support CPU-attached NVMe devices across PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 platforms, the SmartRAID 4300 series deviates from traditional in-line storage systems through a disaggregated architecture that splits software and hardware functions to reduce latency and increase performance.
The SmartRAID 4300 Series
At its heart, the SmartRAID 4300 series (datasheet linked) offers a restructured approach to storage acceleration. Rather than routing all data through a single PCIe host slot, the system separates the Smart Storage software hosted on the CPU from the RAID hardware offload engine. This configuration supports up to 32 x 4 NVMe SSD endpoints directly connected to the CPU, enabling full bandwidth use and eliminating the constraints associated with fixed PCIe host interfaces.
The series includes low-profile, 16-lane PCIe Gen 4 adapters, such as the SmartRAID 4308P-32a, which support RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50. Performance metrics from internal benchmarks show throughput of up to 300 GBps for sequential reads and 196 GBps for sequential writes under Linux configurations. Random IOPS performance peaks at 27.3 million for reads and 22.4 million for writes in optimal RAID0 configurations. RAID rebuild operations are similarly accelerated, achieving up to 5.6 million IOPS and 32 GBps for sequential read operations under RAID5.
Data flow with the SmartRAID accelerator.
The SmartRAID 4300 accelerators also incorporate a suite of enterprise features, including secure boot, attestation, and hardware root of trust for supply chain protection. Self-encrypting drive (SED) support ensures that data at rest remains protected. Management options include the maxView web-based GUI, ARCCONF command-line interface, and support for DMTF standards such as Redfish Device Enablement and Platform-Level Data Model (PLDM) over MCTP for out-of-band management via baseboard management controllers.
Additionally, Microchip's firmware stack supports hot-plug drives, online capacity expansion, background initialization, dynamic sector repair, and multiple hot spare configurations.
Why Disaggregated Storage Architecture?
Disaggregated storage architectures deviate from the traditional coupling of storage software and hardware into a modular system where control and data paths are optimized separately. In the context of RAID solutions, such an architecture allows the storage management software to execute on the host CPU while offloading compute-intensive functions, such as XOR parity calculations for RAID5 and RAID50, to dedicated hardware accelerators.
This separation improves scalability and throughput. By managing NVMe endpoints as native PCIe devices attached to the CPU, the system bypasses conventional host bus bottlenecks. The use of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 further increases available bandwidth per endpoint and enables predictable performance scaling with higher lane-count SSDs or newer generation CPUs.
Furthermore, disaggregation supports flexible system design by removing dependencies on specialized backplanes or host card interfaces. The architecture allows storage configurations to be tailored to application-specific workloads, offering system architects greater freedom in balancing performance, cost, and energy efficiency.
Importantly, this approach also improves fault isolation and upgradeability. Storage software and hardware can evolve independently, and firmware-level management tools can maintain configuration consistency across multiple platforms.
Architectures for Next-Gen Data Centers
Microchip's SmartRAID 4300 series offers a deliberate architectural shift that allows storage performance to match the changing realities of CPU-centric, high-throughput computing. By detaching data flows from legacy host interfaces and leveraging host-attached NVMe configurations, the platform minimizes latency and scales more naturally with advances in processor and interconnect technology.
The Adaptec SmartRAID 4300 series is currently available through Microchip and authorized distributors.
