Slap in a res2sv240 and you're set right! May have to make some sort of custom mounting bracket if you don't wanna chew up a PCI express slot. I Assume that is what I will do w/ my last spare sas expander a lot of us got here on the cheap a couple months back. Then again on second thought that sounds like a magnificent IO/throughput bottleneck since this is mainly targeted at SSD drives (guess you could throw in 2.5 magnetic's but really why?) so 3 HBA's or a 16 port version may be in order.
Bet they would, the lady I talked to seemed very helpful, call them up and hope for the best. I'd imagine it save's them $ as well on ship so it can't hurt to inquire.
Short answer: non expander, sas2.
Since it is not an expander you should theoretically be able to use a 12g sas card and ssd's on the backplane as well since its essentially a mini sas to 4 sas breakout.
True - with a caveat. The backplane itself is only certified by SM for 6G performance. There are tighter design tolerances, trace spacing and ground requirements to get 12G working reliably.
