I am playing with the idea of buying a PCIe SAS Controller card for my Lenovo ThinkStation P710, in order to create a secondary cache pool tiered between the existing NVME SSD's and the array, which consists of Seagate EXO's SATA drives. I know next to nothing about SAS so i would like some advise regarding controller cards.
My primary reason for buying this is for learning purposes. I only need to support a maximum of 4 SAS drives. Speed is going to be the most important aspect, i can see that both 6GB/s and 12GB/s controllers exists, so i am oviously leaning towards 12GB/s. I have been looking at LSI SAS 9311-8i, i can find a lot of these cheap on eBay from China, i am always sceptical of buying things from China, do fakes of these exist? Do you have any recommendations regarding other models or brands?
I really appreciate all help