SAS expansion question

[vr.]

Sorry if this is dumb, I haven't had my hands on SAS expanders yet to fiddle around and answer my own questions so hopefully someone will be kind enough to share their experiences...

In general... if you're hooking an 8 port SAS RAID capable card up to an expander card, does the expander simply present the disks above port 8, when they are off the expander, as individual JBOD ports?

 

[jasonlitka]

If you have a SAS adapter with RAID functionality and hook up an expander then the drives on the expander can be used in a RAID array, just as with the directly-attached ones. Some controllers have limits as to the number of drives per array though, so, depending on the controller, you may need multiple arrays if you plan to hang dozens drives off an expander.