Waterman, The T110 II uses the latest Intel C202 chipset and supports Xeon processor E3-1200 product family.  You can use either the H200 or S300 controller for this server  The limitations to the S300 is that its Windows only.  The server can support 4 cabled hard drives, either to the board or to the controller. The onboard SATA ports are rated at 6gbps : [URL]   page 200.  You will not gain any performance using either controller. Internal storage is limited to 12TB. Hope this answers your basic questions. Regards,    
I'm building a development machine which'll run Win Server 2008 and MS SQL 2008. About 10 developers will use it. pretty standard database functions with each DB about 20GB in size. I'll spec an E3-1230 and max the RAM to 32GB but not sure best option for disk. As it's a dev machine I don't need it to be resilient, no need to mirror, but I DO need speed and space for a budget.  I need at least 2TB of space but more the better and happy to put in 2 or even 4 disks, I understand chassis will take 4. What I'm not sure about is if I should just get modern fast SATA drives and connect 4 of them to the motherboard ?   I haven't been able to find out what the chipset is on the motherboard and if it support 3gbps or 6gbps speeds. I know there is a H200 card available and would spring for that if necessary but I think that only supports 2 drives and not sure then if it will co-exist with 2 plugged directly in to motherboard. Also I've found in the past these Dell controller cards add resilience but are sometimes older slower technology so may be slower than 6gbps or even 3gbps plugged in directly. Our SQL DBA likes as many spindles as possible but that does reduce flexibility and although that was appropriate when disks were the bottleneck I think they are faster now so maybe there is no point if the controller/bus is the bottleneck now ? Any advice please what to order ?    
T110 II disk options for best SQL Server performance. 