The motherboard or “SATA controller” killing your drives? Very much doubt that.
Maybe the PSU.
A misbehaving PSU could fry your drives.
Data handling issues cannot kill a drive, power handling ones might.
So if it was the PSU, is there anything I can do to confirm this suspicion? I’m nervous to put new drives in now just to have them get burned too. The one I have in there now is 500W 80 + standard. According to the PSU primer Davvo shared, this should be adequate?
Or maybe the drives were just all bad in the same way (same batch?).
Well they were all SMR HDDs which I guess I’m learning about the hard way. The replacement drive I’m burning in now is CMR. Definitely not the same batch though. At least this last one, it was a replacement for one of the 2 failed drives that are 3 years old at least.
For guidance about pool layout, please read iX’s ZFS Pool Layout White Paper and Assessing the Potential for Data Loss | TrueNAS Community. And Proper Power Supply Sizing Guidance | TrueNAS Community as a bonus recommendation.
Thanks!