Supermicro motherboard BIOS successfully upgraded to v7.05. The process to add custom applications to Ultimate Boot CD was too much of a faff and so I grabbed a simple FreeDOS image from here:
http://goebelmeier.de/bootstick/
I have also catalogued all disks which will make up the first two VDEVs. I scanned the drive lids (yes really) so that I know exactly what's in the server. I added the models and serial numbers for all drives to a simple spreadsheet. Onto that I will record drive tests executed and their results.
I WDIDLE3.exe against all twelve drives. I used the Ultimate Boot CD image, run from a USB stick. However, nothing I tried would get the utility to work on drives attached to the NAS server, even when the drives were connected to the Supermicro board's SATA ports. A different consumer-grade PC worked fine.
As expected, all Reds were set to 300 seconds and all Greens to 8 seconds. However, the "recertified" drive sent as a 3.0TB Red RMA replacement had its idle value at 8 seconds. Did I get a refurbed Green?
Next up is to dd and badblocks test all eight new hard disks. Need to make a decision on the power supply because this Zippy is really noisy. Then I might be ready for a FreeNAS dry run on physical hardware (for weeks I have been messing around with FreeNAS in VirtualBox).