[Discuss] Changing computer/motherboard

[Murray Strome]

My FreeNAS system is running on a computer with a Gigabyte  GA M51GM 
motherboard. I have 5 Hard Drives.  I have been having some issues with 
one drive, which now appeared to have failed.  It was connected to an  
on-board SATA port.  It turns out that it is not the drive which is 
faulty, but all of the on-board SATA ports. All the other drives are 
connected to a 4 port SATA card on the PCI bus.  It does not matter 
which on-board port I connect it to, it is no longer recognized.  
Because the box is RAID Z2, the failure to connect to that disk has not 
resulted in any loss of data.
I pulled the drive out of the computer and put in an external case which 
I then connected to a USB port. After a few minutes, it was on-line and 
working properly as part of the 5 disk array, so I know that the disk 
itself is OK.

I don't really want to have one of the disks on an external USB port.  
Also, if the SATA ports have failed on the main board, I suspect that 
other things will likely fail as well.
I have a few options, and am not sure what would be best.

I have two other computers which I could use. The main boards for those are:
ASUS M2N68 AM SE2
GForce 6100PM M2 V2.0

Any idea which of these would be better? I have looked at the 
specifications, but really cannot tell.


If I were to switch everything over to one of them, the big disadvantage 
of both of these is that I would have a lot less RAM available.


Another option would to be to buy a new main board, with processor and 
RAM, which would not be cheap.


I don't imagine that anything I do would just work if I did the change. 
I am guessing that I would have to do a new install of FreeNAS (which is 
currently on a USB pendrive). But would all my data be recognized if I 
did that?


Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

Murray