Everyone,
Just wanted to reiterate what a lot of folks already know. I own the following gear:
ASUS P5WD2-Premium motherboard
Intel Pentium D930 (dual 3.0 GHz)
8 GBs of RAM
WDC 8TB drives
generic case
Except for drives and memory, all parts are 12 years old.
I am repurposing the hardware and have turned it into an UnRAID server. I bought the following off of Newegg:
SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA / SAS 8-Port Controller Card
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the above card is Marvell-based and DOES NOT play nicely with UnRAID or FreeNAS!
Recently, I had an unclean shutdown happen and upon reboot, UnRAID wanted to do a parity check. No matter what I did or tried, it would start and a short while later, report disk errors. Eventually, it red-balled a drive. I took the suspect drive out and put it into a Linux rig -- all my files were there and no problems with the drive at all. After reading extensively of the UnRAID and Marvell problems, I went to Ebay and bought a used Dell PERC H310 controller. I researched online how to flash it to IT mode , put it in my system, and now everything is running perfectly! No problems at all! Parity check took 17 hours to complete and not a single error. I am very happy now and have learned my lesson on Marvell controllers.
I am posting this in hopes that it may help someone else out there having similar problems.
Jeff