i want to move to SAS however i had a few questions. Can the dell PERC 5/i cards be used in any motherboard or are they somehow locked to only dell? Also, i see that they are PCI-Express x8 cards, ...

I have some systems that need to run XP -- and no, while most systems I administer are happily on Win7, that's not an option here. Anyway, Dell has officially pulled support for Pre-Win7 OSes from ...