I've got an...unusual case. (Literally the case is weird. Photo below)
The tower is really designed to host two systems, but at the moment I only need one system in it, and would like to eventually populate all 16 bays. It's worked great, but I've run out of SATA ports on my motherboard and as a result I've started to look at some of the IT Mode SAS cards like the LSI 9201-8i for expansion, as you can break out to 4 sata connections per mini-SAS connector. Only problem I have is the length of SATA cables.
My understanding is that SAS cables are capable of running at greater lengths (up to 10m) vs the 1m limit of a SATA cable. My thought is that I could mount a breakout board/backplane in the drive chamber of the case using a couple of SAS connections that split into 8 SATA connectors I can branch off of. My only concern, is that it won't matter how long that SAS cable is if I'm running a SATA connection over it because that 1m limitation might still apply for the sake of signaling. I would hope to solve that by breaking out closer to the drives rather than at the SAS card but I'm pretty lost on how this works at this point.
I can't find a concrete answer to this elsewhere, but I figure there has to be a way to do it. Hell, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely and this doesn't make any sense at all.
Thanks in advance!