dell r620 10 bay - which internal HBA is best?

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talz13

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Oct 4, 2016
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I just got a dell r620 last week, and am trying to figure out which HBA to use with it. Currently I have an LSI 9201-16e in each of my other 2 servers, and was planning on re-purposing one of those for the new r620's DAS connection. But I want to run FreeNAS on the r620, and also want to make use of the 10 drive bays up front in the chassis.

Is there anything to be aware of if I am swapping out the PERC h310 mini card for a full PCIe HBA for the front bays? It looks like it takes 2x SAS connections to the backplane, which of course means I can't use one of the relatively cheap 4i4e cards floating around. And 8i8e cards are still ~$450+ on eBay.

I wanted to have room for a USB 3.0 PCIe card for the new box, but I think I'm going to have to give that up in favor of an internal HBA, or an adapter slot to convert 2x of the ports on the 9201-16e to internal ports to run to the backplane.

Will the 10-bay backplane accept any old 8087 mini SAS connectors, or will I just be stuck with the h310 mini? Also, if it will work, what type / length of SAS cables should I get