Yep, Areca is on the case. The bought an m4 just to test and fix it.

For now, if you disconnect power from all of the drives, boot, get into the bios for the card, connect to the web gui with a second computer through the card's ethernet port, re plug in each ssd, one at a time, and check to see if the card is picking them up. When all of the drives are back and the raidset is normal, you can do a warm reset and it will boot. Some of the drives will have to be unplugged and plugged back in several times to be recognized. Clear as mud, right? I honestly have no idea how i figured it out...