Recommended HBAs and RAID cards for my situation

[anomaly]

Hello,

I just got my SA120, and finished my VM host build for the most part. I'm missing some Intel DC SSDs (going for 3710, and 3700, but I want to find out if 3610s are OK for VM storage, I will explain in another thread most likely) and the HBAs and RAID card.

My SA120 comes with two PSUs and two controllers. Unfortunately could not find the back cages... they are nowhere on sale, eBay, or such.

This is what I would like to do:

• Dedicate 6 bays of the SA120 to a NAS build, virtualized to begin with until I can get a 1U low power system going to run the NAS baremetal. I was considering FreeNAS for ease of use, but honestly I don't mind cli/console access and setting it all up manually without a web GUI, or use a different GUI on top of Ubuntu Server (which I have some modifications for and custom kernels built for work).
• Dedicate the other 6 bays to whatever, likely back and additional storage for VM data, snapshots, backups mostly.
• I would like to leverage LVM/volume encryption, accelerated with AES-NI.
• The VM host has 8 bays of its own, in two SAS backplanes. The motherboard is an Asus Z9PED8-WS, and I use one of the backplanes direct to the SATA controller on board.
  • I might use ZFS for this, or Linux mdadm softraid and accelerate that with a SSD, probably an Intel DC unit.
  • This will be primary VM storage.
• In the VM host I want to virtualize a NIDS/alienvault-like instance, with mirroring of the network data, for about a week, so I will have an encrypted copy of the network traffic in the lab for 7 days, for forensics and analytics (related to my job as a consultant and researcher).

So, here come the questions:

1. What is the best and most cost effective (today) HBA for a PCIe 2.0 system that allows decent SSD speed and IOPS?
   1. In both i (internal)) connector and e (external) and both (like 8i8e) configurations.
2. Same, but for PCIe 3.0.
3. A good ext+int connector RAID card to do hardware raid (possibly what I might do with the other backplane in the VM host, if I use ZFS or softraid there) and connect to the SA120 too.
4. How can I have two hosts connected to one SA120 at a time? (which has two controllers as I said)
5. Should I bother to look into SAS SSDs? What models and brands are the popular ones people go for, based on performance and price/second hand market options? Is ti really worth it at all?

That's mostly it. I was looking into the 9380 cards for RAID, the 5015 for PCIe2 HBA/IT mode, and the 9211s for the IT mode too, but these last two don't seem like they will be future proof for SSDs and PCIe3.

Thank you!