techmattr

Depends on what you need. I really hate 16:9 aspect ratio on laptops so the XPS and Surface Laptop 3 are the only ones I considered. The HP and Lenovo have really bad touchpads so if you make use of the touchpad in Windows a lot then that may drive you nuts. The new XPS 2-in-1 has the maglev keyboard which is a love/hate keyboard. I love it. A lot of people hate it. The XPS 13 9300 didn't go with the maglev keyboard so it either isn't popular or its just needed in the 2-in-1 form factor. The XPS only has USB-C ports. I mean you could write page upon page on how these are different but it just comes down to your preferences and requirements.

I'm sure you'll love it. I went with the old Alcantara surface instead of the new aluminum option and I'm glad I did. The Alcantara is really comfortable to use.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 is a decent value right now. Linus has a few videos on it as I think he is still using it as his daily driver. I got my girlfriend a XPS 13 2-in-1 and it's an awesome laptop. I like my Surface Laptop 3 better though because of the taller aspect ratio and it's a bit lighter. I really like the XPS 2-in-1's maglev keyboard though. The XPS has a much better touchpad but the Surface Laptop 3 has a bigger touchpad. Can't really go wrong with either one but the XPS 2-in-1 isn't worth the extra $300 honestly.

All of those he listed have absolutely horrendous touchpads. If you're used to high quality glass touchpads then you would have absolutely hated any of those. I'm not sure why you didn't wait for the XPS 9300 though. It has everything you're looking for except upgradable RAM.

If you don't need a lot of storage or RAM then it's hard to beat the base model Surface Laptop 3. Especially if you care about functional aspect ratio. 16:10 and 3:2 are where its at. I have the base model ($899) 13" and I really like it. For me the Surface Laptop 3 and XPS 13 2-in-1 and the yet to be released XPS 13 9300 are the only options since they are the only laptops with a 16:10 or 3:2.

You can download these bootable files. If you're running legacy BIOS you can type sas2flsh -o -e 5 at the DOS prompt; and if you're running UEFI you can type sas2flash.efi -o -e 5 at the efi prompt.

First thing I'd do is remove the SAS2008 BIOS if you're not booting from any device on the card. You can sas2flash –o –e 5 to erase the BIOS.

There was a 100+ page long thread on avsforums 5-6 years ago about media storage builds and about 10-20 of those pages we dove into the compatibility issues we were facing at the time with SAS2008 cards (and other HBAs) and Z77/Z87 boards. This brings back memories... The issue we were facing at the time dealt with running 3x SAS2008 HBAs on desktop boards and found that many of them didn't work even though they were electronically capable and it was a crapshoot finding a board that worked with 3 PCIe slots. We tried board with the exact same PCB but different model numbers and one would work with only 1 HBA and the other with 3 HBAs.... it's most likely a firmware issue as @leadeater suggested but ultimately it just makes sense to buy a server or workstation board that you know will run active PCIe slots 100% of the time. As far as the drives not showing up on the expander.... how do you have it connected? It could be anything from user error to the PCIe slot not being active to bad Chinese eBay cables.

SnapRAID is what you're looking for.

It depends on your usage and width of vdevs. If you do a lot of writes monitor your usage. If writes aren't flushing and you're maxing cache.... add more RAM. If you use dedup then you need at least 1GB per TB. Moving my Plex install dir, cache and transcode directories to a SSD made a huge difference for end user client experience. No more buffereing when trying to FF/RW through transcoded material.. no more lag when loading thumbs or video previews.

RAM can have all sorts of issues that don't show up in any memory test. Ask anyone who has ever run memory tests against an HP or Dell server that just threw a bunch of un-correctable memory errors. Almost every time those tests come back clean. They don't show anything. At best they give you a little piece of mind when testing new memory that was just delivered. As far as a home build... I care about my personal data. As I said, it's implied that if someone is taking the steps to build their own NAS that they care about their data as well. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to bypass the most important check when writing that data. If you don't care enough about your data to skip a check to see if the write was valid then why store it at all? Or why not just forego the home build and use odrive?

Yeah. Doing things correctly is some nonsense.

Most people who build their own servers buy used. Who says it isn't fair? You? Okay. I don't care if you don't think it's fair. It's correct. I've only been doing DIY servers for 25+ years, working in Enterprise data centers for 15+ years and helping people on various bulletin boards, mailing lists, blogs and forums for 20 years.... but who am I to argue.

Okay.

So using hardware directly related to transferring your data on a system that doesn't have correct drivers for that hardware isn't a risk? Since when? There are plenty of systems on eBay for $150 or less. Here's the first result I got: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-X8SIA-F-Server-Motherboard-I-O-Shield-32G-Memory-X3450-CPU-Fan-/262740915896?hash=item3d2c9436b8:g:WeMAAOSwOyJX6Sey