azeotrope

Sounds more like a permissions problem than a problem with file explorer. Are you using user mappings or logons to your shares? If you're using android with a linux file server you should consider using NFS instead. It's lighter and generally faster than samba. You don't really have to worry about permissions as you can just map all users to one user on your server.

It's probably a sideband cable to connect to an enterprise server's backplane. Not exactly end-user hardware, so info on it is harder to find.

Depends on how important your data is to you and how much you read/write this data. For an active business file server, there's definitely a benefit. Bit flipping is very rare and personally I wouldn't worry about it in my home server, but if you would like a little extra securityfor your data, then go for it. Low end cpus on Ivy bridge also support ECC

You don't get any of ZFS's "data integrity" features like checksumming if you run in raid0. If ZFS finds a checksum error, there's no parity so it doesn't have a way to correct your data. Snapshotting will still work but that's about it.

XFS is fine. for basic streaming and storage, there's not much difference between XFS and ext4. Your nas should come with smb/cifs support using samba, which is an implementation of the native windows network file protocol. OSX has support for this protocol too.

ZFS works completely differently as the filesystem itself handles the raid eg when resyncing, zfs is both the raid and the filesystem itself it will only sync the blocks in use. Basically this means you can't switch from your nas raid to zfs. Your nas device is obviously linux based and since zfs isn't mainline in linux, it won't be available by default. ext4 has good performance for a raid system, I use it on all my linux boxes. The filesystem you use makes no difference as to whether you connect to it using windows or not. You're connecting via a network protocol such as smb/cifs, not to the filesystem itself. Windows has no way of knowing what the filesystem in use is on network devices

By windows 7, you mean the emulated windows 7 rendering in infinality? I am still referring to native cleartype, not infinality's window 7 emulation which is better than cleartype. I use custom options which look better than both of those IMO. One of them is too blurry, the other is way too sharp and pixelated. The glyphs are also not aligned correctly in either one. I'm guessing you haven't taken the time to configure it. You do realize that intel, IBM, AMD, Samsung etc all have full time linux devs, right? Each to their own i guess. I am far more productive in vim than in any other editor. the learning curve is steep, but it was worth it for me in the end.

Maybe? I run 4 file managers: mc ,vifm, ranger and spacefm, all superior and faster than explorer in one way or another

LOL. my WM is set up to be a full fledged desktop that does everything that I would do on windows. I use it for everything except gaming. I'm not a multimedia guy though, I just consume media and windows has better support for that kind of stuff. My linux set up does everything other than gaming that I do, better and faster than windows 7 or 8.

What if you're raid controller fails? you'll still have to find one which supports the same standard, so that's not a good reason to go for a card instead of mobo raid. Intel raid standards will very likely not change or if they do they will most likely have some backwards compatibility. The only raid5 capable SATA cards in that price range that I'm aware of are highpoint and 3ware, which are OK for average use, but not at the LSI or adaptec level of quality. Something like the rocketraid 2310 may suit your needs.

chkdisk is a bad idea if the drive is failing since it will try and correct bad blocks by writing to the drive which could just make it worse. If it is failing, you need to get the data off of it without doing anything else to the drive. ddrescue is perfect for this, but I'm not aware of any windows equivalent.

If you don't see an ethernet port then it's most likely using fibre channel. It probably also uses a serial port for terminal conection. This isn't the kind of hardware that most people have laying around, so if you want access to it, my guess is that you'll most likely need to get at least a fibre channel router or a fibre host adapter.

IIRC you can change the label using the label command but I don't think this will help. Windows doesn't use the filesystem label to boot, it'll use the partition's ID or maybe the filesystem's ID. Since the label is on the filesystem, not the partition or the drive as many people believe, it may indicate filesystem corruption. Your best bet is to try and access it on oanother computer, if you haven't yet.

This looks specific to ROG motherboards which may help you.