Intel RES3FV288 Storage Controller Upgrade Card

The Intel RES3FV288 is a SAS-3 expander card that solves a specific and common storage scaling problem: your Intel RAID controller has too few native ports for the drive count your build demands. By connecting to an existing compatible Intel RAID controller via SAS, this card fans out to 28 SAS or SATA device connections — 8 external ports running at either 12Gb/s (SAS-3) or 6Gb/s (SAS-2), depending on the connected drive or backplane. It communicates with the host system over a PCIe x4 interface and carries 8MB of onboard RAM for expander table management. The MD2 low-profile form factor allows deployment inside chassis where a full-height card would not fit, a meaningful advantage for rack-mount servers with constrained PCIe real estate.

This card is built for high-density storage environments: direct-attached NAS builds, video production storage arrays, backup-to-disk infrastructure, and enterprise server configurations where a single RAID controller must manage more drives than its native backplane supports. It is not a standalone product — it requires a compatible Intel RAID controller as the host and has no RAID compute capability of its own. For the right use case, however, it is the most cost-efficient path to 28-port SAS/SATA capacity. Builders should plan their cable runs carefully: managing 28 SAS or SATA connections inside a chassis demands disciplined routing, and the PCIe x4 bus bandwidth should be modeled against expected concurrent drive activity to avoid aggregate throughput surprises under peak workload.