I installed the debian firmware image via the stock gui and rebooted. I was able to login into the installer via SSH. After setting up the disk partitions the next step was to format them. Now what would happen was it would get up to 33% and and not go any further (depending on the size of the disk it can can a long amount of time for the progress bar to go beyond 33% and this is normal) however a ping I would have running would fail to respond after a couple of minutes and the SSH connection would finally drop. I tried this numerous times raid/no raid etc and always the same result. 

Faulty hardware I though so bought another with different disks etc and guess what? yep same problem. 

Next step was a serial connection so after a lot of messing around 9took days) with different cables/connectors etc I finally got one working. 

Now i'm left with one I managed to return to sotck and another which is bricked and says 'No network devices found' the top NIC doesn't even light up when plugging into it so either the chip or ports are toast.