The guy who quoted spec sheets, and has obviously never actually done rebuilds on large arrays and recommends an almost 10 year old RAID card that doesn't even have proper driver support, or a proper place to download the driver says he knows what he is talking about... HA!
It doesn't matter if it is old, the support from the manufacturer is clearly not there. And if the hardware is good, it doesn't matter if it is old, it will still be on the manufacturer's website for people that are still using it. That is why they are selling for dirt cheap. It is hard to even find the driver for the damn thing, and will probably only get harder as time goes by. Once a manufacturer of a piece of hardware removes the product completely from the website, like it never even existed, it is probably a good sign that hardware has reached the end of its useful life. Yeah, you can still do some digging on their website and find the driver download, but it took far too long to find it already, and who knows how long it will be available. So in a couple years, when you go to re-install Windows, oops no more driver. Sure you can go buy another cheap card off ebay,
but then you run into the main drawback of hardware RAID. Because the array was build on that old card, you have to find one that is compatible with it or loose all your data and rebuild the array from scratch.
Also, because it is an almost 10 year old design. its slow. It uses a very weak PowerPC based processor, which means RAID5/6 performance is horrible. Ironically, I've actually used that card back in the day. For its time, it was good. But the biggest problem was RAID5/6 write performance. The processor they used was simply too weak. The only saving grace was the onboard cache, so if you enabled write-back then write operations were good enough as long as you didn't fill up the cache. But with only 256MB, that fills up pretty quickly.
The highpoint card I recommended might use the main CPU to do the RAID calculations, but so what? The CPUs in computers have come a long way in 10 years. Back when the 9650se was popular we were still on single, or if you were really ballin' a dual-core, netburst processors. They needed all the main CPU power they had for doing other tasks, they couldn't spare CPU cycles for RAID, and the RAID calculations would load up a netburst CPU core pretty hard. But today, it is completely different. We are talking about putting a quad-core Skylake chip in his machine. It has more than enough power to do RAID calculations without even breaking a sweat. In fact, I know for a fact(because I actually have experience on the subject) that the highpoint card will easily do sustained writes to a RAID5 array of over 100MB/s, which for a network server on a gigabit network is easily fast enough. I also know that the 9650se will do the same, but only until the 256MB cache fills up, then the write speeds drop down to the ~20MB/s mark. That's how slow it is at actually writing to the RAID5 array.
If you are going to recommend a card off ebay, and there is nothing wrong with that, recommend something worth using. You can fine good Adaptec cards,
like this one, on ebay for not much money. My recommendation of the Highpoint was just a recommendation of something inexpensive that was new and I only recommended it to replace the onboard controller, because what he had was filling up all the Intel ports with hard drives and leaving no port for his SSD. At the time we were talking about 6x6TB drives, 2 arrays of 3 drives, with a 1:1 backup. The highpoint would allow him to use all the hard drives he wanted at the time on the RAID card, and put the SSD on the Intel.
It is bad advice to recommend the card you did, and shows you don't know what you are talking about. All of your recommendations so far have show how little knowledge you have in the subject actually...
Don't use 2TB drives. There is no point, and you leave yourself no room for expansion. If anything, get 5x4TB drives. Price wise, it works out about the same, but gives you 3 open spots for adding drives in the future.
And, I've already explained why not to go with the AMCC card. It's total junk. The Adaptec I posted above would be better if you want a complete hardware RAID.
Finally, I would use Win10 Pro.
The one I linked you to is what you should use. It's dirt cheap, it's got 12 ports so you will still have room to add more drives if you use a bigger case, it comes with the battery backup unit, and it's one that was very popular so you won't have a problem finding a new one if you do happen to have a failure. I use the 8 port version myself and I know for a fact it will handle what you're going to do with it. I've had mine running 10 simultaneous streams (2 transcoded, 8 direct play) while downloading from my seedbox at 50Mbps and unRARing, without a hiccup.
