Need help finding a raid card.

[koolaidkitten]

I don't know much about mass storage cards really so I was hoping someone could help me out. I currently am using LSI 8308ELP but I need to eventually move away from these because they do not support 4TB drives.

My needs are:

1. Compatible with ESXi 5.5
2. Compatible with 4TB+ drives
3. I don't actually need RAID. I just run all my drives single.
4. Would prefer to have SAS SFF8087 connectors because the backplane of the chassis i'm using uses those and it looks cleaner, but I could deal with using SAS to sata breakout cables. (or any other cable changers if need be)
5. I would prefer If I could get a single card that has 4 connectors but I can settle for getting 2 cards with two connectors each. (I need this as a whole to be able to support 16 drives.)
6. I like cheap, I don't mind buying used. But I would love to keep this under 300$
7. PCIexpress interface. I have 2 x16 slots available.

Thankyou for reading.

 

[QHalo]

That budget is tight for 16 connections.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118142

Found this on a quick search.

 

[koolaidkitten]

That budget is tight for 16 connections.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118142

Found this on a quick search.

Hmm interesting. I'm not too negative against the idea of paying more so I will consider it. The only problem I see with that is I see a couple of issues where it is somehow disabling the onboard sata of motherboards. That is an issue I will have to investigate because I can't have that as I need my onboard sata ports.

Thankyou much for the research.