OK, I read every scrap of information that I could find regarding upgrading from v5 to v6. And when I felt extremely comfortable that I knew exactly what I was doing, I took the plunge. Of course, the very first thing I did was back everything up on both of my flash drives. On the first go, I formatted the Sony flash drive, downloaded and installed unraid v 6.6.3, ran make_boot, and copied my Pro key from the backup to the config directory. I then went back and carefully copied the network.cfg, ident.cfg, share.cfg, and shares/*.cfg from the backup into the config directory on the Sony flash drive. I then plugged the flash drive into my unRAID server and hit the big red switch. The system came right up initially looking pretty sweet, but then towards the end of the boot process the screen started barfing all kinds of stuff about problems with all the HD drives. Screen after screen after screen of it. In fact, so much of it, I thought for sure maybe the SATA controller had gone south. But the Ethernet came up and was working fine! I brought up the unRAID web page on another machine and took a peak at the array configuration page to see if any hard disks had shown up. Not even one. Then I used the web page to do a graceful shut down of the system. I knew all the HDs were working fine previously, so just to do a sanity check, I re-flashed the Sony flash drive with the backup of the v5 system that was installed this morning and lit it off again. Just like before, the system booted right up to the prompt, with all HDs present and accounted for. So obviously, the SATA controller card didn't take a dive. (Still no Ethernet with v5, of course, but we knew that...) For the last test, to make sure it wasn't one of the files I was moving between v5 and v6, I re-formatted the Sony flash drive and reinstalled v 6.6.3 just as before, except this time the ONLY file I put on it was the Pro Key. Of course, it now calls itself Tower, and it knows nothing about shares or users, but other than that, the system booted up exactly as it had the first time, puking one message after another about bad HDs, interfaces, slow data, etc. (However, this time, I captured the syslog - It is attached)
My call is that this SATA controller card is not compatible with v6. (I think you and Squid may have both cautioned me about it.) So I think I'm in the market for a controller card. (If you look at the attached syslog and something else jumps out at you, please let me know.) Do we have vendor and part numbers for any known PCIe 8 or 16 port SATA controller cards that would work?
syslog-2018-10-20.txt