I'm glad it was helpful. My standard practice for a lot of these servers (and some workstations) is to just throw in a LSI controller and run with it. Performance is uniform. Ports are uniform. ZFS works great on them. On regular workstations, I end up with a bunch more single SATA/SAS connectors if I need them for anything.
Heck, some years ago I put the same LSI controller in a DL380 G5 and connected it to the 8xSFF backplane so I could run ZFS on that disk array instead of the super slow and cumbersome (and not ZFS compatible) internal RAID controller.