Reddit mentions of LSI 9200-8E 8-Port 6Gb/s SAS/SATA PCI-Express x8 External Host Bus Adapter

I was just in this position.. I've got an older i7 box with 24GB of ram, and had 8x3TB drives crammed into the tower forming a RAID-6 array that was ~97% full. I'm running openmediavault to manage the storage simply because I prefer Linux to something like FreeBSD. It also has a PLEX plugin as well, and I run PLEX on the storage box locally.

After a lot of research, I purchased the following.

LSI 9200-8e - SAS HBA - ~$40

Lenovo ThinkSever SA120 DAS - ~$200

12 drive caddies / trays for the DAS (optional, but suggested) - check eBay, ~$100 total. You can use the caddies that come with the SA120 but need to dremel them and drill screw holes.

I moved all of my drives to the DAS (Except OS drive) leaving 4 more bays for expansion. I added 2 more 3TB drives and grew the array (actually still waiting on that to finish...).

So for ~$350 I moved to a much more flexible setup (you can actually daisy chain the DAS's, so you can buy another one for 12 more bays when you're ready) and extended the life of the setup by quite a bit.

You didn't ask me, but you could get a Lenovo SA120, LSI 9200-8e, and the appropriate cable for under $300 – leaving some cash for Lenovo drive trays.

(Note also that none of these parts are necessarily ideal for you; for example, the MSA60 costs less and includes trays but has its own drawbacks. It's hard to say without knowing requirements.)

I’m using an LSI 8200-8E, MD1200 is attached to it with two SFF-8088 cables. Supports full 6G.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MQP232/