HP Gen8 Microserver - Adaptec 6805e SMART data issue

[Oceanic]

Hi I am new to Unraid and trying to set it up on my HP Gen8 Microserver.

 

Everything seems to be working well except that I am not getting any SMART data or temperatures from my drives connected to my Adaptec ASR 6805e controller (in JBOD mode). If I move the drives over to the inbuilt Smart Array B120i Controller then I do see the SMART data and drives temperatures in Unraid. This is not desirable as the B120i only has two 6Gb interfaces and the others are 3GB. Previously I was using the 6805e controller on Windows where utilities were able to read the SMART data without issue. 

 

Do I need to install a driver for the Adaptec ASR 6805e controller or configure something in Unraid for the SMART data to work correctly?

 

If the 6805e is not compatible with Unraid, can someone recommend an 8 drive controller for the Gen8 Microserver that will work correctly with Unraid? I was thinking maybe the HP Smart Array P420 which can be picked up fairly cheaply these days and should hopefully work well with the system fans.

 

Finally for redundant Pool drives, what is the recommendation for Unraid; use the hardware raid on the controller or use the inbuilt Unraid raid features? I guess the latter probably give better monitoring, notification and visibility of drive problems (via Unraid) but the hardware raid would be slightly quicker. 

 

It's worth pointing out that I have just discovered that my Gen8 Microserver has the iLO NAND problem (where it has worn out). This prevents me from loading the HP Smart Array software (by pressing F5 on boot) unless I boot the server directly to an offline iso version, which is far from ideal.

 

My drives are:
4 x HDDs in the HP Gen8 Microserver drive bays (18TB, 14TB, 6TB, 6TB)
3 x SSDs (1TB, 1TB, 1TB)

 

Thanks for any help