I am moving my from my 12 bay norco with a dell h310 + 4 onboard satas to a norco 4220.

 

I am using a mAXT board with only a single PCIe 16 slot, so adding a second h310 is not an option.  Rather than upgrading the board (then probably the CPU, Ram, and everything else) I have opted to just upgrade the controller.

 

Is the LSI 9201-16i the best choice for this?  On ebay they seem to range from $130 to $150.  Is there a better deal out there?  Planning to use the 16 port controller + 4 onboards to power the 20 bays.  There are also 2 SSD slots in this case that I will also run off 2 other onboard sata ports for a total of 22 drives.

It is my favorite 16 port controller.  I'm not familiar with any others so have no comparison to give you.  But the 9201-16i is only IT mode so is plug and play with unRAID.

Another option would to get an expander, like the Intel RES2SV240, it can be found on ebay for around $70/80.

2 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Another option would to get an expander, like the Intel RES2SV240, it can be found on ebay for around $70/80.

Thanks for the reply. Can you tell me how that works? Does it hook up on its own independently, or does it have to interface with my existing h310 in some way?

It connects to the HBA, with 1 or 2 cables, since you only need 16 ports 2 is best for max bandwidth, then 4 cables go to the 16 drives, it doesn't need to be on a PCIe slot, it's optional for power only, it can also be power by a molex plug.