Tim Nelson wrote: > Greetings all- > > I need to purchase a PCIe SATA or SAS controller(non-raid) for a Supermicro 2U system. It should be directly bootable. Any recommendations? The system will be running CentOS 5.4 as an LTSP system. Thanks! > is this for internal or external or both? how many SAS ports you need? do you need SFF x4 sas ports or discrete x1 sata ports (of course, the former can be converted to the latter with an 'octopus' cable). the LSI stuff I previously recommended covers a wide range of this, for instance, the 3081E-R has 2 internal SFF-8087 x4 connectors, the 9212-4i4e has a SFF8088 x4 external connector and 4 x1 SATA internal connectors, etc etc. you need to know what sort of chassis or backplane you're connecting to... most 2U servers have a drive backplane... these backplanes can connect to the HBA via a range of options, SAS supports a full multiplexor (eg 4 channels to 12 drives), while plain SATA only supports a simple expander (eg, 1 channel to 4 drives)