soja

Do the chips on the board have any heatsinks? If not depending on the size you may be able to try adding some heatsinks with adhesive thermal pads to help cool them down.

Could you temporarily create an Ubuntu USB stick and boot into live mode on that? Once you're in there check to see if it can detect any network interfaces and get you connected to your network. If Ubuntu can't find any network interfaces it is likely that they are disabled somehow or some hardware is bad in which case you would need to use a PCI-E network card.

You need to remove the https:// when using nslookup. I tried resolving it a couple ways and I am getting nothing back. Does the registration expire? Mine: nslookup 07e70bf7719b38236e5bbd01e075841e80dd034c.unraid.net 8.8.8.8 Server: dns.google Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name: 07e70bf7719b38236e5bbd01e075841e80dd034c.unraid.net Address: 192.168.1.150 Yours: nslookup 9a7de74204df13577c0f19772c3a864033bc216d.unraid.net 8.8.8.8 Server: dns.google Address: 8.8.8.8 *** dns.google can't find 9a7de74204df13577c0f19772c3a864033bc216d.unraid.net: Non-existent domain

I noticed this by default too. If you go into your network settings and set the IPv4 Address to automatic(for dhcp) or static for setting a static IP then the interface will be brought up on boot.

Plex buffering is probably other things. Most 1080p movies are 20Mb/s or less and even SAS gen 1 is 3Gb/s. SAS gen 2 is 6Gb/s and there are faster revisions. Look into network bottlenecks(wifi?) and if you are writing heavily to the array a lot look into a cache drive for writes so you don't interrupt movie watching randomly. I love the old x3650 workhorses. They use too much power for the performance you get out of them but as a backup box they should be perfectly fine.

Yes sorta. 8i = 2 x4 SAS ports that are meant to break out into 8 total SAS ports for drives. The cards typically support many more disks through expanders(256 in your case and I have seen up to 1024). When you use a bunch of expanders obviously you sacrifice total bandwidth for each drive but spinning disks don't run anywhere near the maximum SAS speed anyway. If you have an extremely large array or are using many SSDs you would want to consider a 16i or two 8i controllers to keep the available bandwidth high. For the backplane, expander cards are very common. I have an IBM SystemX 3650 M3 that has 16 2.5 inch drive bays and the server has a built in spot for the SAS expander. Unless you are planning a very high performance array stick with the cheaper option of a very common HBA/Raid card in HBA mode and a SAS expander.

open up a command prompt and type nslookup longstringofnumbersandletters.unraid.net and screenshot or post the result.

Depends on how many connections the backplane has, some have 2 some had 4, some may have different kinds of connectors.

That can also handle 256 drives in IT mode

a 9211-8i can handle 256 drives with SAS expanders in IT mode. If you already have that card flashed to IT mode you should be able to plug it into the two ports on the expander, then from there go to your drives.

The card you linked is an expander. You need a HBA and an expander together. The HBA(sounds like you already had one) instead of connecting to the drives now should connect to your expander. Then you plug drives into the expander. The expander card does not need to be flashed as it is just multiplying ports.

Apparently not. Where is this setting in unraid? EDIT: Found it. very strange that they would call it that since it is just giving you a free custom dns hostname with a lets encrypt cert attached to it.

SSL would just add https:// to the address instead of http://. Do you mean you were using a dns hostname?

you can enable "mirror syslog to flash" in settings->syslog server. This should place a syslog file on your flash drive and append to it on reboots. You should disable this once you're done troubleshooting as it can impact the life of your flash drive.

I'll mess with it more later. As of right now it is working as expected and I have a few TB's waiting to be written to the newly expanded array.