I have an Unraid system with 14 drives in the NAS, and a DAS with 8 drives connected.
Currently I have 6 drives in NAS connected via motherboard sata, and the other 8 via a pcie to sata card.
I then have an 8e HBA in IT mode connected to a SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adapter in the DAS, connecting to the 8 drives.
I am changing the motherboard and CPU, and stupidly brought a motherboard with only 4 sata, 1 x pcie x16, and 1 pcie x4.
Is there a SAS expander I could get, along with an internal HBA, that could connect to the internal drives of the NAS, and then have external ports to go to the DAS? I looked at the Adaptec 82885T, and apparently the 2 external ports are input only. Would it maybe better to get 2 of those, 1 in NAS, and 1 in the DAS, and use my current HBA 8e to connect to them both?