The Intel SASUC8I and SASWT4I offer port expansion at reasonable prices.
These would be purely for expansion (They can do RAID0 or RAID1, probably not desirable).
There are a million different ways to go about increasing storage inside a server though, it depends what software you're going to be running on the box too.
The Intel SASUC8I is based around the LSI 1068e chipset as is the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8, IBM BR10i or the LSI SAS3081E-R. These are cheap but older SAS HBAs (Host Bus Adapters - Basically an interface card rather than a raid controller). They can be had for around US$100 on US Ebay. The LSI 9211 is a very good entry level SAS2 current generation card. If you can get an IBM M1015 controller (usually pulled from a new server and replaced with a better card, the original is sole off on ebay), then you can flash its firmware to turn it in to a 9211. I bought two M1015s for around US$100 each with the LSI 9211 going for around US$200+. Flashing only works on certain motherboards though. Search google for a set of instructions and the file you need. It is well documented.
Dandaman said:
Windows home server 2011, basically i've been wanting to get into this sort of thing for a while now but have never taken the jump until now.
Still trying to get my head round it all tbh, lol its quite confusing at times
Ok, the cards above are SAS cards using 2 ports, each port having 4 channels with each channel supplying 1 device. So with one of these cards you can add 8 more drives. You would need two SFF-8087 -> SATA 7 pin cables which are fairly cheap on ebay.
One advantage with SAS is that it is compatible with SATA drives but SAS and SATA speeds on the controllers are not always the same (i.e. a controller may do 6G SAS but only 3G SATA) so it is worth reading the specs in detail. Note, only SATA III SSDs are likely to get bottlenecked at anything under SATA 3G and that also depends on their usage.
Say you want to go bigger than 8 drives then you could add another SAS card (PCIe slots permitting) or add a SAS expander. A SAS expander is to SAS what a network switch is to a network. The expander allows many more devices to be connected and manages the physical switching of data coming from the controller. Expanders tend to be expensive with the HP SAS expander (P410) coming in at around US$250 (which can handle 24 drives) but this needs a PCI slot for power and can be a pain to flash without a HP P411 controller. The Intel RES2SV240 has 6 ports but 1-2 need to be attached to the controller depending on the desired bandwidth, can be powered by a Molex power connector (so no PCI slot needed) and can be had for around US$250.
So in answer to the initial question, a LSI 9211 (or Intel M1015 reflash) would be the best bet or a 1068e based SAS card. If you want to stick firmly in the SATA only realm then you can get a port multiplier which will allow you to split one SATA connection in to multiple but the single connection bandwidth is shared between all active devices and / or a SATA HBA. Info on what PMs are
here. Note that some PMs need PM aware controllers. TBH getting a SAS controller is probably around the same price and better bandwidth and expansion possibility for the future.
