i742877

Excellent! That is just as i expected. Thank you for the clarification! Since i'll now be looking at two cards, is there something else besides the LSI9208e to consider?

At the moment there are just the existing SATA2 disks in there, but yes, i was intending on using SATA3 in the enclosures and SSDs in the x3650 itself

Eeep! I'm not sure if it is a PCIe3.0 Xeon, I believe it is this http://ark.intel.com/products/40200/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5520-8M-Cache-2_26-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI

Thanks for sticking with me I thought the speed would be more like 95MB/s as per the diagram at ? I take it there is no speed disadvantage in this situation to getting a 16e card ? There is a SAS9201-16e available locally.

Thanks ken-ji. Both EXP3000 only have one ESM at the moment. From what i could deduce from page 12 of the manual is that dual ESMs are used for redundancy only... ? I've been looking over at thread again and wondering if i could be better off with 2 x 6Gb/s cards as there seems to be a significant performance hit with using a single card with a single link and 24 disks. Are there any other cards i could consider besides the LSI9208e if my intension was the purchase two? The majority of the 8e cards seem to the two port of 4 x 4, except for this 9300 12Gbs card which is described as a 8e, but only has a single port...

Greetings, This is my first Unraid build and I'm looking for some advice on a HBA/SAS card that will connect the two enclosures below. I don't have a lot of experience with enterprise hardware so it has been a little bit of a learning curve. There is some great information in these forms if you know what to look for, though i'm still not sure i understand it fully. I have the following hardware; IBM x3650 m2 7947 - 12 x 2.5" bays (currently using Expansions Slots Two PCI Express riser cards with two PCI Express x8 slots (x8 lanes) each 2 x IBM EXP3000 - 12 x 3.5" bays each I have already flashed a M1115 for the internal drives and installed Unraid and all seems to be working well. I'm unsure as to what would be best for connecting the two enclosures with the existing riser cards. Would a single LSI9208e suffice or is there something else i should consider? I've attached a internal shot of the x3650 Any advice would be great! Thank you.