I been at this about two weeks now, my frustration level is growing, and I really need some help. I have an asRock z87v extreme4 mobo with with Sata ports, no problem, unRaid sees the drives, no errors anywhere, good to go!  So I use most of my drives up transferring all my movies and such over.  The drives that I copied from are now available to add to my array.  I'm out of Sata connectors, so I add a cage to my Fractal case for three drives and a Vantec 4 channel 6-port SATA 6gb/s PCIe Raid Host Card and connect three more drives to unRaid.  I start up and see the drives, place them in disk 8, 9 and 10.  unRaid sees them and I have to Clear the disks to add to the array and when cleared they will be added to the array, sooo, I clear the disks, it gets finished after about 45 minutes and they, disks 8, 9 and 10 disappear.  Back to the drawing board,  they do not show up again until I stop the array, shut down unRaid and restart.  Then it's the same drill all over again.  Is it the SATA card, I don't know, what am I missing?

You'd be better off if you use the PRECLEAR utility to clear the drives. From what you've written, it sounds like you are clearing the drive inside unRAID and that usually takes a long time and your array is unusable during that period. I've never tried to clear a drive within unRAID so maybe I'm making the wrong assumptions.

 

PRECLEAR is not bundled with unRAID and must be installed separately. It's a "command-line" utility. There is a lot of information on this forum about it and how to install it.

After much research on the board, I found a list of compatible (or not) Sata controller boards, where I should have looked at prior.  My Vantec going back, and I'm going with the Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.  That should do the trick!