Matrix
I got to the bottom of what is up with my original server – disk 8 cannot be detected or is somehow missing, the cable may be missing from the drive bay. The give away was that the controller is capable of RAID 6 and though drives 1 to 4 are the same size and detected 5 to 7 was detected and though 8 was their in it’s caddie it was not showing up in BIOS of the card.
This teaches me something importantly – document what you do. You could be looking at it one day, I’m lucky I remember what is in there from an Areca controller to the the type of server it is – Supermicro do some good work. It’ll be nice to figure out what is up with Matrix (the servers name) but at least I know it’s not the servers actual hardware.