[Discuss] Changing computer/motherboard

[brendan]

i'd be tempted to just go with another SATA PCI card and ride the
existing motherboard for as long as you can - i've seen motherboards
lose their IDE/SATA controllers and keep going for years.

On 16-05-19 08:21 PM, Murray Strome wrote:
> 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
> 
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