Hope someone can make a recommendation for me, I am looking at making an upgrade to my existing ESXi box by replacing the single 500GB SSD with my VM's on it to an RAID5 with 4 500GB SSD's, What I am hoping someone can help me with is a recommendation on the RAID card to purchase off ebay for this task. I was looking at 8 channel LSI cards just what model. I would prefer a 8 channel SAS as I would also like to at a RAID 5 of HDD's in the future.
Do you plan to use software RAID or the card's hardware RAID? Software is usually the best option for safety, but performance can be a little bit lower.
Also, what PCI Expression slots do you have available? Many of the high end RAID cards are PCIe 8x. They will work in 4x and even 1x slots if they are physically wide enough to take the card, but you won't have enough bandwidth the saturate all the SAS ports.
For software RAID I'd just get a basic, cheap SATA card or two. There is very little to gain from having high end RAID cards with SSDs unless you want the advanced management features or hardware RAID5.
I use an Adaptec 6405e, it's 4 channel though and I believe that you can flash it to IT mode as well, but I could be wrong. It has a alot of features that from your description that you would use.
Dell PERC 5i & 6i cards can be had for fairly cheap on ebay. The 5i is only capable of (up to) RAID 5 though so keep that in mind. They also tend to have dead batteries on them so you might want to order one for it at the same time, if you care about such a thing. Both of them are SAS. Both of them are capable of up to 8 drives. You will need the associated multilane cable for 8x drives. I'm not sure if they are proprietary or not.