San Digital Tower and eSata Cards

[rbendorf]

Hi! I have had a NAS4Free server up and running now for about 18 months or so. I started with FreeNAS and early on moved the whole system to NAS4Free. Thanks to the developers for a innovative system.

Anyway, I have scoured the net for info on the Sans Digital (SD) towers and eSata cards. Hopefully I can pick the brains of guys here who have perhaps worked with the Sans Digital products.

I saw in several posts that the SD esata boards that they ship with the SD towers have compatibility problems with AMD CPUs. I am in the process of upgrading my systems and am trying to go to small systems with low power CPUs.

One system has a ASUS AM1M-A motherboard with AMD Athlon 5350 CPU. The second system has a ECS NM70-I2 motherboard with a Celeron 1037u CPU. The Sans Digital TR8M+B tower (eSata) holds 4 WD Red 3TB drives in a raid5 ZFS array. The 4 drives are still under warranty and have been tested. I am also using a RockedRaid 622 esata board, or an esata ESATAPCIE8 board

I would like to continue to use the Sans Digital tower(s). But with the ASUS AM1M-A MB the system becomes unstable with various errors and any videos that I am playing with lock up. With the the ECS MB the system is pretty stable and will stream videos with no problem, but in monitoring the system there are still various errors.

If I get a response on this forum I will get more detailed information. My preliminary scrub seems to indicate that there is a hand-shaking problem between the SD box and the esata cards. As both of the esata cards are from SD, perhaps I need to get a different esata card. Any suggestions or help would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Rich