You can put a tape drive on the last port like you describe.

Nothing on the expander will suffer unless the full 96gbit link to raid card is saturated and it has to start throtteling stuff.

if you have something 4-8x cache SSDs with high load they would normally go in one cage and that cage gets its own controller.
To not risk saturating the link from expander and impacting performance + avoid the tiny latency expander adds.

Hopefully vmug does not use same system as the regular licensing, they are not issueing new licenses or quoting prices atm.

8 lanes just refers that it has 8 lanes directly on card.
That you can connect 2 cables breaking out to 8 ports without the need for an expander.

The expander works similar to a network switch, the cables back to p408i-a is its uplink.
With 2 cables it aggregates the 8lanes to 8x 12gbit and those 96gbit is shared by the devices on the expander.

In the typical dl380 the expander would have 2 cables to each of the 3 front cages + have 2 spare ports for any drives you have in rear of server.
With a maxed out 30x 2.5" front+back server they share the 8 lanes to server.

You can even add another expander to the expander if you want, the card supports 200+ drives if you keep throwing expanders at it.

Would not expect it to just ping something like google.com, maybe use their dns tho.

The ones ive dealt with have a rotation of urls it tries to load.

Bonus joy is when you use the TV longer than they expect and some of them stop responding, so even with no firewall/vlan etc segmentation it still needs this spoofing done.

I hope you got it for free and did not pay for that thing.

But as for usecase you might want to add what gen box it is and what controller/expander it has installed in the rear.

atm im not running much since not much time to lab, just the base stack.

about 35€/mo for 650w average consumption.

Tailscale and a cheap VPS running the exit node tends to be a common route.

Lets you expose services out without opening anything localy and gets you full control out from the VPS without ISP meddeling.

There are other alternatives but tailscale has the best free tier with upto 100 devices, exit node+router, solid access control and mfa.

You would need to have the nvme not sas/sata SFF cage for this to work.

Otherwise what you are looking for is an adapter going to pci-e slot.

It stops being homelab when the focus goes from labbing to production, when it becomes a homeprod enviroment instead.

50k could be good or it could be bad.
You really need some specs to go with it to say what side it lands on.

If its a freelance tech type 1man company i would 100% expect you to be taken advantage of.

For being what it is id say its okay, its not an amazing deal but not expensive either.

Was offered some trays of 1tb 3.5" new in bag recently and said noty.
Beyond just the pure baycount needed to scale some storage in those sizes, the consumption becomes equaly horrible.

You can go with a 1-3$/mo shared hosting and it will be higher quality than a pi from home tho.

With that amount of drives and extra NICs it sounds fairly expected.

Possible? yes

Recommended? not in any way