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I hear you! Too much time researching, especially for what controllers are actually available in Portugal... lol
I already have a big enough case (this one), with 3x 4-in-1 CM drive bays (got them all at once to keep the look clean).
Now the real problem is the controller I need to get. I either have the option of 4-port SiI-based PCI dumb controller, which I need two of (total cost of about 160) to get the extra 8 ports I can handle (not considering the extra space below the uATX motherboard, of course), which kind of sucks because they're not that cheap and 8 drives over the PCI bus is asking for trouble, even if we are talking about a simple WHS machine with rather low bandwidth requirements; or I try and find the elusive Supermicro 8-port PCIe 4x SAS controller, which is 100+ easy (IF I can get it in Portugal, of course), all the while crossing my fingers that it will work on the single PCIe 16x slot on my motherboard (shared with the GMA3100 IGP, btw).
HDDs are the easy pick. The controller is what sucks...
@Nitro: I have already read about the potential issues with the EARS drives. While I'm mostly a Samsung guy when it comes to HDDs (about 30% to 50% cheaper for the same size, at least in Portugal, is hard to beat...), it seems to me that an EARS drive should be just fine as a pool drive, either with or without the offset jumper, right? As long as you don't accidentally plug or unplug the jumper on an already pool-added drive, the most you'll get should be lower performance on a non-jumpered drive, because of the sector misalignment, right?
Oh, and since we're at it, how are the new 2TB F4EGs working for pool drives? Are they 4K-cluster, too?
