LSI00051 question

[stetser]

First, the link.

I'm building a RAID 5 array consisting of Western Digital RE2 WD5000YS drives. Initially the array will have 5 drives, for a total of around 2TB. Obviously with 8 ports on the card, I have room for a little bit of expansion.

My question, however, concerns the "expanders" for the card. Specifically, are expanders something that I could fit in my full tower case? From my googling, the only thing I've discovered are rack mount style expanders, which I am not interested in. What I want to know is if I can (eventually) stock my case full of 16 drives and have them all cabled to my LSI00051.

If so, does anyone know how much such an expander would cost, or even better, provide a link to somewhere I could purchase one?

My bottom line is if I cannot cheaply and easily expand this LSI into a 16 port card, my money will be better served buying a Highpoint 2320, as it is roughly $100 cheaper and also an 8 port card. Since I will never have more than ~5 boxes accessing the array at any given time, I'm simply looking for the best $ per port ratio.

 

[i_robot73]

From what I've been reading, the expanders are quite cheap.

Most I've been have been 'slot-cover hubs' for external use; but a few have been for internal

 

[unhappy_mage]

That's not an expander, it's just a wideport to multiple narrow port converter. There are really four SAS connections coming in, and four going out.

LSI makes chips like the SASx28 which are meant to be integrated onto backplanes. Supermicro has implemented them in the CSE-933E1-* and E2 cases. That's really the only company I know of with an internal expander solution. SAS hasn't caught on fast enough for there to be many peripherals to support it, unfortunately.