Robert,

You're not going to increase your transfer speed by bonding the ports.

But here's a question: Have you enabled all the cache settings on your Areca controller?

And here's a suggestion:

Go download your log file from the GUI and look at the test.log.
Look specifically at the hdparm and see what it's showing.

Go to the Status, Hardware tab, scroll down to Logs.
Download to your hard disk. Then right click on it to view the files. Look for the test.log.
Right click on that to view the file.

-Asaph