The X10-SLM has 2 8x slots and a 4x slot (electrical)
Use the 16i card + the externalising adapter in an 8x slot.
This gives you support for 12 internal, and 4 external drives without using a sas expander, and leaves you with a spare pcie slot, that you can use to host a pair of nvme drives.
The bandwidth will be about 4GB/s iirc correctly. Which is 333MB/s per drive you have, or 250MB/s if you fully populate. Which is plenty for HDs.
Whenever possible, I would try to keep the NIC on CPU lanes, in a x8 slot, to avoid oversubscribing the x4 link between CPU and chipset.
If your drives are SATA, the -4i4e does the job.
If the drives are SAS and/or this is a virtualised setting and the HBA has to be passed through, you have no said that, the -16i and SFF-8088 in front of an unused slot.
In SFF-8087 cable from the HBA to the adapter is 50 cm (1.6 ft).
And the cable from the adapter to the external hard drives is 200 cm (6.6 ft).
That clearly exceeds the 200 cm (6.6 ft) maximum of the eSATA specifications.
I am going to buy a 100 cm (3.3 ft) eSATA cable which will probably solve the problem.
The last leg from a sas expander to a sata drive is over sata, and thus sata cable limits apply, not sas.
You would normally run external sas to a sas expander in a jbod chassis, and then that expander breaks out to a backplate, which is where the sata drives are, thus expander to backplane distance is not too great
To reinforce this, it’s the total length of cables that matters here. In the plan as described one would be 0.5 m over spec (0.5 m + 1 m = 1.5 m).
Also I am curious about the use of “eSATA”. Can you link the cable you’re getting? I would have expected an SFF-8088 cable, since that is what goes into the adapter you linked. But maybe you’re getting an SFF-8088 to eSATA fanout cable[1].
If so, if you can’t find one shorter tha 1 m, the remaining solution would be to do as @etorix said, use the 9212-4i4e and use the motherboards SATA for the remaining internal drives. ↩︎
Remember, if you are not using a server case then HBA will get hot. Attaching a fan to its heatsink will eat up physical space making the PCIE slot below it unusable
This JBOD chassis is very convenient because it’s trayless. It allows me to put the hard drives in and out very easily/quick. I use it basically for cold backup, and I handle quite a few drives.
