There are a number of PCIE SAS HBAs ,or SAS RAID that you can run in HBA mode, which will handle SAS and or SATA drives with an adapter. Getting 16 drives off a single HBA is totally doable and you don't need the more expensive battery-backed cache models since ZFS is doing the pool work.
I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD.
There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.
I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD.
There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.