Perhaps not doing enough research thinking that my requirements are relatively low, instead of purchasing a Synology NAS, I opted to use an old Intel server I had and build an unraid system. I can find documents now though that it may have been too old back in the early '10s.

 

What I have: Intel S5000psl which has 2 Sata ports and 4 SAS/Sata ports.

 

My system was working with two 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives to the SATA ports, I moved all my documents I had kept in network shares on my windows PC, and verified I had copied everything over. Then I began adding the additional drives from my windows machine which it no longer needed.

 

I added 2x Samsung SSD 256 GB cache drives which worked, but which show an error "Probable ATA device behind a SAT layer: Try an additional '-d ata' or '-d sat' arguement" I didn't think much of it, and with the cache I was seeing 120MBps transfer speeds from my other wired machines to the unraid server.

 

Then I added 2x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives to the SAS/SATA ports which then only showed 2.2TB available each. I am concerned that if I use these drives with only 2.2TB I will lose data if I eventually connect it somewhere which can see all 4TB, is this accurate?

 

Should I buy an expansion card with additional SATA ports, or should I just scrap the whole thing? File transfers have seemed to be fast enough, but I have not gotten into my Jellyfin server which is now giving "playback error this client isn't compatible with the media and the server isn't sending a compatible media format" errors on media which had no problem from my windows machine network share folder.

 

Perhaps a newer motherboard in this case?

 

Probably what I am really looking for is people to say "scrap it" and some advise how best to use the equipment I have to minimize cost in getting something set up.

 

Thank you!

Can you upgrade your BIOS?

18 hours ago, winterberrycrackers said:

Then I added 2x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives to the SAS/SATA ports which then only showed 2.2TB available each.

This means that the controller that the drives are connected have a hardware limitation  of 2.2TB and are from the dinosaur age.  Only workaround is to add another controller.

trurl, thank you, the current bios is S5000.86B.12.00.0098.062320091136 and was updated June of 2009, I cannot seem to find an upgrade for this.

 

Squid, yes, I gathered as much. What I am wondering is should I give up on this motherboard and use something slightly newer? maybe use the case and periferals and source a used motherboard off ebay.