Glad You found it, let's hope it stays ok.
I'm not opposing such an approach, rather the contrary; I myself do mix&match whatever I happen to get, curious for the outcome. Only, one needs some willingness to investigate and figure things out, and not being frowned upon an occasional bug-hunting.
I usually go with the cheap stuff, then watch where the weak points are, and replace just that with improved equipment, as needed - and learn a lot in the process. With computers I had mainly three areas of issues:
- failing memory, not easily detectable with memtest. ECC capable equipment is worth the premium, it reports exactly when and what failed.
I'm still looking for a way to monitor temperature of my memory chips - they should provide that data, but FreeBSD cannot find it. - cooling problems. There is AFAIK no packaged solution to monitor temperature of a bunch of disks, and then switch individual fans appropriately. But it's not too difficult to script+build one.
- power wiring. Putting lots of drives onto Y-cables does not work, the connectors have too much resistance. Sometimes even the original wiring does not work.
).