I am a c++ programmer and database administrator looking to expand my knowledge of server administration and maintenance. I have read the Wikipedia pages and several other documents I found by googling, but there are still a few things I don't understand.
Consumer-level hardware comes with multiple head for SATA and PATA connections, and you are expected to buy cables to connect these to your drives. In server hardware, there is a lot of talk about backplanes. If I buy a rackmount server, like a Dell PowerEdge, can I expect it to have all the needed connectors, so I can just slot in my SAS or SATA drives?
How do the drives work with / without additional RAID controllers? If I plan on running ZFS or some other kind of software RAID, it seems that an expensive raid controller may be an unnecessary upsell.
How do external SAS boxes present the drives to the system? For example, a Sun J4200 http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/expansion/4200/specs.xml claims to feature '4 (x4-wide) SAS host/uplink ports and 2 (x4-wide) SAS host/expansion ports'. Assuming the 'expansion' ports are used to daisy-chain multiple boxes together, does that mean that only sixteen (4 * 4 wide) drive can be visible to the system?
To connect such a box to a system, I assume you need some kind of external SAS connector on the server. Are those normally standard on a system, or do you normally need to use SAS RAID adaptors that specifically provide external SAS ports?