I'm looking for recommendations for a PCIe eSATA card and 4 or 8 bay enclosure.
Maybe someone might know why I'm having the issues described below:
Back story:
I have a Rosewill RC-219 connected to a MediaSonic Probox 4 drive enclosure. For 3 years I ran this card and enclosure in an Optiplex GX-620 running WHS 2011 and DrivePool. After about a year and a half of solid performance the Probox started to occasionally disappear. If I cycled its power it would come back without doing anything else. I replaced the Optiplex GX-620 with a Dell Vostro 430 running Windows 7 Pro 64. I also replaced the RC-219 with a new identical card.
The Probox would disappear on the new setup a few times a week but I found if I rebooted every night the problem stopped with our normal use. Recently I started converting all our WTV mpeg2 recorded TV to h.264 MKV on a second machine that reads the movies from this box but saves them on its own drive. Under this use the Probox has been disappearing several times a day.
I get an Event ID 9. I saw someone online who running WHS-2011 with the same PCIe SATA card who flashed a certain BIOS and driver and the above behavior stopped - I can't replicate their experience because the drivers they used are 32bit.
BTW The 4 drives are 4 year old WD30 EZRX-00MMMB0 (Green 3TB). I ran wdidle3 to stop the heads from parking but a couple of the drives already had 250K plus load cycles before I figured that out.