Re:  Will the T7820 support SAS out of the box or is extra hardware really needed? It's not.  It will need flexbay with proper backplane for SAS and long cables to reach PCIe slot w/optional controllers such as tri-mode MegaRAID 9440-8i or 9460-16i.  I set up MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i in one system and it worked perfectly well with 12 Gbps 10K SAS drives. 
I purchased a T7820 and wanted to upgrade to larger drives.  I do a lot of simulation work, so a fast drive is required.  Because of the need for a larger drive, I purchased some SAS 12gb/s drives since the documentation says that it will support such a thing.  I popped in the first drive and nothing happened.  I can't tell if the drive is running or not since nothing shows up in the BIOS.  While the manual seems to state that it supports SATA and SAS drive, I found one document that says it needs extra hardware to support SAS.   Will the T7820 support SAS out of the box or is extra hardware really needed?
T7820 SAS or NOT