[tlug] White Box: Some Assembly Required ...

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

Got a bit of a head scratcher going on and, now that I have read 
everything I can find on the subject, I feel as though I know less now 
than when I started.  I am building / rebuilding a torrenting box.  I 
have the following parts, but don't know how to put it all together ... 
or whether I can ... to get the setup I think I want.  Can anyone 
suggest a possible working setup.  I am not sure I have all of the 
software required or that I have hardware bits connected to the right 
other hardware.

O/S is Lubuntu 18.04.  No RAID or LVM drivers are installed.

The hardware is:

- ASUS Motherboard (8-core AMD 8370e) with AMD SB950 chipset, which 
permits setting up hardware RAIDs (0, 1, 5, 10) and six onboard SATA3 
slots. BIOS is the latest version.

- SATA control is set to RAID in BIOS, but that does not seem to have 
any effect in the current setup.

- A Kuroto Shikou 10-port SATA3 controller card which is mounted in the 
second PCIe x16 slot (x4) (and which reports it is AHCI

Disks:

- My boot disk is a 120Gb Samsung SSD

- Optiarc CD/DVD R/W

- Six Toshiba 3Tb HDDs, which I want to use to make a hardware RAID 5 
long-term storage disk.

- A 2.5 and a 4Tb for current incoming and pre-sorting (and because I 
had them and they're free extra storage on which I can place stuff I 
want to review immediately or soon before placing in "deep" storage).

What I want to do is have my O/S on the SSD, receive incoming data on 
the two "other disks" and organize, sort and catalogue data to be 
logically stored on the RAID.

Right now, I have the CD/DVD, SSD, 2.5Tb and 4.0Tb connected to 
motherboard slots and I have the six HDDs I want to use for the RAID 
connected to the controller card.

EXCEPT:

When I boot up, I can only see two of the controller card mounted HDDs.  
I've tried switching the cables around and I have two ten-packs of SATA3 
cables that I've switched in and out with no change.  I can remove all 
of the 3Tb RAID HDDs and start / view them individually in Lubuntu when 
they're mounted in a USB chassis.  I have changed cables around and can 
always see two, but not always the same two.

In the course of researching the problem, and before I sent this, I 
found an AMD report on the SB950 chipset which says that it can only be 
used for hardware RAIDs of four disks or less, which means that I should 
be trying to make a software RAID from the six HDDs.

The Windows solution is to plug all HDD and SSDs into the controller 
card and to start all operations from the card rather than the 
motherboard (which seems to me to be creating an electron bottleneck).  
Is that also the Ubuntu solution?

Does RAID / LVM software play a role that I haven't understood or 
figured out until now?

I feel as though the answer is staring me in the face, but I am not 
seeing it.

CL