I recently picked up a used machine that to my surprise came with a PCIe SAS controller included. When it boots up, it self-identifies as a Dell SAS 6 Host Based Adapter. However, when I look up the system's Service Tag it shows that the system originally shipped with an SAS 6/iR (which I believe has RAID capabilities.) I plugged a single SATA drive into the card and it would not recognize the drive, however the onboard SATA controller had no issues with the drive. Unfortunately I don't have any SAS drives to test the adapter with.
So is this a RAID controller or just a vanilla SAS adapter? The onboard SATA controller is only SATA II (3Gbps), so if I plugged a SATA III SSD into the HBA would it get 6Gbps throughput? That's of course assuming I can get it to recognize a SATA SSD...