Hey Guys, I've been running Freenas for awhile now. Hardware is 1.8celeron Ram 1GB Sata Card is Via - not sure the model.... its 2 ports and I have 6 x 1.5TB HDs

All ran ok while running on 1.5TB, no raid. I'm now trying to create a raid5 with my 6 hds. Software raid... is it normal for it to take roughly up to 2 weeks just to build the raid? Sorry, I'm very new to implementing raid and googling doesn't tell much other than it takes a long time.

Also the Raid building process seems to fail many times... going to degraded. I suspect its cos 4 of my HDs are connected to my motherboard and the other 2 are connected to my sata card...what's your take?

I'm considering 2 options now... either get a 8 port sata card and attach all the HDs to it. Or get a raid controller 8 portcard which is probably gonna be more pricey... also how do you access hardware raid through Freenas?

I like how Freenas emails you should your harddrive fails so can this be done as well with hardware raid?

Thanks in advance guys.