buy a DL380, add 8sff, no sas expander. 16SFF - two raid controllers, stupid fast.
My flagship server is that. dual 10gbe emulex cards, dual LSI 9266, samsung 840 pro.
One option to remember is the P420/1GB FBWC works in the dl380 g6/g7
which can do ssd read acceleration with hp SAAP 2.0 key. Imagine two of these guys with 512gb ssd read caching 7 2.5" drives in raid-5 . or 1TB SSD caching 6 2.5" in raid-10
Smart shoppers do their homework! Always check backplane revisions!
The question I ask is "Can you upgrade this to the latest (xx.xx) firmware for me before shipping? If so we have a deal".
99.9% "Sorry we cannot we have no computers to do this" (other than the 1000's of servers they are listing). rarely do I get "Sorry, without a backplane RMA this will not take the latest firmware which stabilizes and improves throughput so your junk doesn't hang and flake out".
Oddly the same units that are 3x-10x more expensive, typically say "Yes these are on the latest xx.xx firmware".
Makes you go hmmmmmmmm.