Hi, I was going to purchase a second controller for my R720XD, front disk container and backplane is a perc mini mono setup. However I remembered I pulled a few SAS HBA's out of it when I got it. They are Dell g164p 6GB/S HBA cards, apparently they are the same board as the more common H200E just with no internal headers, just external.
I'm thinking I can use these instead of purchasing another card, but unsure how I would hook this up, as far as I can deduce I'll need to plug in a backplane somewhere in the rear for the SATA board and I'll have to route the cables from outside the chassis. The g164p cards have a type of sfp connector, assuming this is standard for connecting backplanes etc and buying a backplane off of eBay for R720XD will work with this?
Related question, I would assume it's not possible to split the front drive bays so some are served with different controllers? If not then I'd have to mount new drives for the HBA controller in the rear somewhere, there does look established slots there already, 2.5".