Well, you should brace yourself for a migration then. FreeNAS of today is not the FreeNAS of 4 years ago. Two totally different projects that only share a name. The current project is targeted at enterprise-class storage solutions and is NOT designed for yester-years hardware.
While you can sit and argue about what it was, that's not what it is. So you should either sit down and familiarize yourself with the "new" FreeNAS or, as you put it, prepare for a migration.
Personally, I don't care what a particular person's reason is for using hardware. I've heard it all from "I live in a place that's about as remote as living at the south pole" to "it was spare" to "i'm a hungry starving college student that needs storage". The bottom line is my main responsibility here is to get people to buy hardware that will not cause data loss, will be reliable, and will make them happy with their purchases without breaking the entire bank. All of our recommended hardware pretty much follows those 3 simple rules. Breaking the bank is definitely always debatable and it's not a debate that anyone will win. We've picked the most reasonably cost ideas out of what is available. Heck, we even tell you to go to ebay and buy it there to save yourself $150 or so off the retail price!
Anyway, to end my comments in this thread, you need to stop and do some more reading. Besides your obvious choice for hardware that isn't anything we'd recommend for a motherboard, CPU, and RAM a port multiplier is just outright stupid crazy. PMs (Port Multipliers) are a laughing joke and anyone that cares about their data would never use one in a million years. Just use our forum search feature and look at what has been said about them. Look at the poor soul that built one of those Backblaze chassis 2 years ago with PMs and lost 3 pools before tearing the $8000 chassis apart so he could repurpose a few of the parts because he was tired of the PMs killing his data.
Sorry, but unless your goal was to see how quickly you can destroy your data, you missed the mark. Give our FreeNAS documentation, my noobie guide, and our stickies a read. They were literally written in blood, sweat, and tears of users before you that lost their pools (sometimes their marriages too) as a result of poor decisions.
I don't harp on people's poor choices anymore. If they want to do it, go for it. I won't lose sleep when you're another one of those "my pool won't mount" threads and you're begging me to help you and I tell you that you should just kiss the data goodbye because it's gone. I do shake my head in disgust because I know it's coming, and it's never pretty.
