I have a SAS2-826EL Series Backplane, a X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard, 96 GB RAM, and two E5-2670 CPUs. Do I need to buy a RAID card or replacement backplane?
Your server supposed to comes with an LSI2108 Raid controller. You need to connect a miniSAS HD cable from the controller to a miniSAS HD port on the backplane expander (SAS2-826EL). If you are missing a controller, please get a SAS2/SAS3 controller card.