Possible, but slightly complicated, with the magic of bifurcation you can split your x16 slot into x8x8, or x8x4x4, or even x4x4x4x4!
…Your motherboard however does not support bifurcation from what I see from the manual on Asus’ website 
There are other solution, but nothing that I could recommend as ‘reliable’ (unless you have a crazy budget).
You might be stuck on 2.5gig that is built into your motherboard - which for HDDs might be close to ‘good enough’. Do you even get speeds close to what the 10g nic provides?
Anyway - before we worry about all of that, might be good to validate that the HBA is the cause of your problems. It could indeed just be a faulty boot drive & that we’re worrying about nothing relevant!
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Thanks so much everyone. The issue just came up again and I was able to screenshot from PiKVM (The server console) I am still away from home but would soon be there to see things for myself.
I finally got into the box. I can confirm that the boot disk is connected directly to the mother board (I know I could not be that thick to connect such an important part of the system to an HBA)
I checked the sata cable and it seems (to me) to be a little finicky so I changed it for something much thicker (one which actually came with the board.
I should also add that the boot pool disk is a Kingston SSD SATA A400 SATA3 2.5 if that could be the issue. I don’t know if i can mirror the boot drive… is this advisable?
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I would keep it simple for now and make sure you have a current configuration back up file.
Yes you can mirror the boot drive.
Couldn’t quite tell whether your had access to the NAS or not. Having a mirror may help if you can boot to second remotely or walk someone through changing boot device choice
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Glad it ain’t the HBA! Maybe I was being too cautious & we’re finally getting to an age where hba on m.2 isn’t code for crappy port multiplier!
Anyway, swapping cable is solid choice - if problems persist clean install on replacement drive & import the config.
Mirroring boot drives is clutch for faster restoral time, but the ease of use is questionable since the bios doesn’t necessarily pick the working drive. For example you have mirrored boot drives A & B: if the bios wants to use A, but A is faulty but not 100% dead (still seen in bios), bios will still try to use A to boot & fail. You’d still have to intervene & either unplug A physically or manually select B in bios.
It is faster than doing a clean install & reloading config though.
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Hello everyone. Can here to add closure to this thread. The issue was indeed caused by the sata cabale for the boot pool disk. Once it was replaced the issue went away. It has been 4 days now since I replaced the cable and everything has been smooth as butter. Unlike before now where the issue comes up like every 6 hours of operation.
Thanks to everyone who helped me in narrowing down the problem.
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