I just found this listing for an LSI 9201-16e on eBay. While I'd prefer a 16i instead of 16e, this looks like it's way too good a deal to pass up for a brand new card! I've got plenty of spare back-plane openings I could run the cables through to get them back inside the case. (Heck, the case has grommets for water cooling that I could run the cables through if they're long enough!)

 

The card specs (as listed on eBay) says it needs a PCI-E 2.0 x8 slot. I've got a Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H MoBo which has a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot, but it says that it only supports 3.0 with an FM2+ APU. I've got an A6-5400 which is only an FM2, not 2+. What I don't see is whether the MoBo x16 slot is PCI-e 1.0 or 2.0 without the FM2+ APU.

 

Two Three Four questions:

1) Is this as good a deal as it looks?

2) Can anyone help me determine which PCI-E spec my MoBo supports without the FM2+ APU in it?

3) I've done very little (almost no) eBay purchasing. With 98.8% positive, would you buy from this seller?

4) With 14 drives in the server at the moment, should I hang them all off this card or should I attach some directly to the MoBo?

With LSI 9201-16e you will some specific cables - on the card side it's 4xSFF-8088 connectors. have you any back-plane in your server? or just a HDDs with SATA? if SATA then you need  4x of these for example: https://www.amazon.com/Mini-SAS-SFF-8088-26P-SATA-Cable/dp/B00PKN5NXG  

Keep in mind cable length also..

Thank you for answering the 5th question! 1 meter of cable length will be more than enough - good thing it's a big tower case with lots of room to store spare cable!