road hazard

I bought them directly from their website and I have some good news to report. After a few emails, they agreed to process a RMA for the PC that won't boot. I had to pay $99 for a restocking fee (due to its' age and them not having any units with that particular CPU).
 
Depending on how smooth this transaction goes, I'll work on getting the other two replaced.

hahahaha.... very true. It's fixed now.
 

Yup, RAID is not backup. And the reason I want to use RAID 1 for my boot drive is because when my main drive failed, I tried to use Timeshift to restore onto another drive and Timeshift failed me. So..... RAID 1 for boot drive and Timeshift just to have copies of all the data as a fallback.

To bring this thread to a close, I ordered an LSI 9207-8i HBA (will make sure it's on the P19 firmware since everyone complains about the P20 version) and will re-use my forward breakout cables from the PERC H700 to hook up 8 of my 4TB drives then hook the other 4, 4TB drives straight to my motherboard and combine them all into an MDADM RAID 6 array.
 
CPU will be an i7 7700K and I'm going to add another 8GB of RAM taking me to a total of 16GB. OS will be Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon.
 
Thanks for all the replies everyone!
 

To bring this thread to a close, I ordered an LSI 9207-8i HBA (will make sure it's on the P19 firmware since everyone complains about the P20 version) and will re-use my forward breakout cables from the PERC H700 to hook up 8 of my 4TB drives then hook the other 4, 4TB drives straight to my motherboard and combine them all into an MDADM RAID 6 array.
 
CPU will be an i7 7700K and I'm going to add another 8GB of RAM taking me to a total of 16GB. OS will be Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon.
 
Thanks for all the replies everyone!
 

Glad you brought that up.... I remember looking on here:
https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-freenas-nas-servers/top-picks-freenas-hbas/
...and for their top list of HBA's, they mention 'SAS 3200'. But I don't understand that. Where can I go to find an EASY TO UNDERSTAND chart that lists all the cards that are in the 3200 series?
 
 
Yup, totally understand all that. My H700 can't be flashed to IT mode and since I'm going with mdadm RAID 6, that's why I need to find an excellent HBA because once this thing is set up, I should be good to go for at least a 1-2 years (based on my current rate of hoarding). Once upgraded, I don't want to touch none of this until it's time for a refresh. That's why I'm doing a ton of homework and want to pick the best card I can for my situation. Doing all this reading and testing makes my head hurt.
 

Was that the song I was thinking about? BTW, thanks for helping my friend make it out of the train station 2 years ago! Unfortunately, he has since sworn allegiance to the Galactic Federation and we haven't heard from him in over 2 minutes. His half eaten chocolate bar has since gained self-awareness and is determined to go deer hunting with or without the extra shoelaces next week. Only time will tell if KBL can find the lunar volcano but I doubt the barn has crossed off that last 'to do' item before the dog learned to speak. I know, right?