WHS2011 add-in card question

[[LYL]Homer]

I'm currently upgrading my WHS v1 to 2011, using Drivebender. I wanted larger than 2tb drive support, and I just got the motherboard in as an RMA. In my previous setup I had a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 card, a Highpoint PCI card, and motherboard ports to connect drives to.

With my new hardware setup the motherboard has 4 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 connectors. I've got room for 22 drives in the Norco (2 cages internal) - so that leaves 16, or two 8-port cards. The motherboard has two x16 length PCIe slots, one is 16x electrical and the other is 4x electrical.

Biostar TH67+
Core i3-2120T 35w
Norco RPC-2040

I currently have 12 drives that are SATA2 (1, 1.5, 2tb) and one that is a 3tb SATA3, but all new drives will be SATA3 and at least 3tb. Eventually SATA2 drives may get replaced with larger SATA3 drives.

What I'm looking for is advice on the add-in cards. Can I just add two AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 in with one running at lower bandwidth from the 4x electrical issue (the 'SAS2' version is PCIe 8x, the plain 'SAS' is 4x)? Or, should I go with one AOC-SAS2-MV8 and one AOC-SAS-MV8?

Price is a consideration and both of the above cards are in the $110 range which is within my budget. I have to admit that I have skipped over a lot of the discussion here about SAS expanders since much of it went down the unRAID, FlexRAID, etc. routes. Should I be considering that hardware route instead?

One last thing, where are you guys getting your SFF-8087 breakout cables?

 

[midnkight]

I got my two set on Monoprice and another 2 set on ebay. Both work great, so you can't go wrong depending on where you go.

As for expanders VS adding more HBA card. I went the SAS expanders route, I like the idea that if i ever change out my HBA card, I can leave my SAS expander. But the cheaper route would have been the HBA move.

I went with a LSI 9211-8i and a Chenbro CK23601, and that combo cost me $700. But I have the plan to expand beyond my current 15HDD setup to 24+. At the time, I was limited to a single X16 slot to use on the motherboard. Else I could have bought two m1015 if i had multiple PCIe slot to play with.