Storage controller should be able to handle 8x sata, it can handle more?

[Smoothalicious]

Hey everyone,

 I have a question regarding the HP Smart Array P410 that's comes shipped in the HP Proliant DL 180 G6. It is stated in the specs that it can handle 8 sata disks, but the case itself has twelve hotswap bays. Both the raid controller and FreeNAS (a linux distribution) can see and use all twelve disks. Thus my question is: what does the 8x sata mean then?

 Kind regards,

S.

[SudhakarP10]

P410 Controller  has Eight (8) SAS physical links distributed across 2 internal x4 wide port connectors. 

maximum of 8 SATA / SAS drives.  if you need more than 8 drives to be used eithter you can use another controller or SAS expander.

Regards

Sudhakar

[Jimmy Vance]

The Quickspec for the controller will answer all your questions

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04111713

Key Features 
The SA-P410 Controller supports up to 24 drives depending on the server implementation.
Additional drives can be supported with cache and connection to the HP SAS Expander Card.

Seamless upgrades from past generations and upgrades to next generation HP high performance and high capacity Serial Attached SCSI Smart Array controllers.
6Gb/s SAS technology delivers high performance and data bandwidth and contains full compatibility with 3Gb/s SATA technology.

x8 PCI Express gen 2 host interface technology delivers high performance and data bandwidth up to 2 GB/s maximum bandwidth.

Modular, easy-to-upgrade design lets you optimize performance by upgrading from 40-bit 256MB cache to 72-bit 512MB battery-backed write cache (BBWC) or 72-bit 512MB/1G Flash Backed Write Cache (FBWC).

Addition of the battery or flash backed cache upgrade enables array expansion, logical drive extension, RAID migration, and stripe size migration.

Additionally, Smart Array Advanced Pack License key enables RAID 6 (ADG), 6+0, Advanced Capacity Expansion, Mirror Splitting and Recombining in Offline Mode, Drive Erase, Performance Optimization-Degraded Reads and Read Coalescing (VOD).
Mix-and-match SAS and SATA hard drives, lets you deploy drive technology as needed to fit your computing environment.

Software consistency among all Smart Array family products: Array Configuration Utility (ACU), Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA), Systems Insight Manager, Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU) and SmartStart.

Low-profile PCI Express form factor - ships with a full size bracket for deployment in either a lowprofile or full sized slot.