need help with dell t7500 desire to use as PC sas and other questions,

[the13bats]

I enjoy messing with old comps and have built many from scratch but still many things I have left to learn, hopefully some of you tech heads can help me out,

I was given a dell T7500, it has dual processors, and is the 2.0ghz, only 4 gig dimm at the moment but 12 slots, at the moment I am just doing my testing of it, getting to know it,

I desire to use it as my desktop, so I started hunting around the net for answers to things I do not know,

it has 3 sata ports one has a optic drive and I have my os hdd plugged into another one,
the last is empty.
from online research it would appear that if I desire to use a ssd then I have to get a sata3 card as the sata ports on this motherboard are just sata2, if I do that what is a good sata3 card to use,

it has 4 sas hdd ports and this starts my confusion,
can I plug 1 to 4 sata drives into those sas ports and have them each as separate drives each with its own letter?
I was told that I can by default but I still do not understand the whole sas raid thing,

I did try plugging my os drive into a sas port and it boots up normally provided sas is enabled in bios,
as you see I really do not grasp what sas is and how it relates to this computer and what I desire to do, when enabled it has a place to configure sas which is way beyond my pay rate, so please clue me in,

next,
the motherboard has no built in graphics card but I had two to choose from,
one was a NVidia quadro nvs 295 and it seemed to work fine, the second wads a radeon x1300 / x1550 and when I swapped it out it too worked fine,
so which card is the better one to use?

okay enough to grind on for now, many thanks for any help and guidance on this,

cheers,
b

 

[hang-the-9]

You do not need to get any card to use an SSD, just plug it into the existing SATA ports. SATA 2 speeds are plenty to use with an SSD.
SAS is a higher end spec for drives, used in workstations and servers. SAS drives were faster than SATA drives, but a lot slower than SSDs, they ran at 10k-15k RPM.

Neither of the video cards you have will run any games, and for normal Windows use either is fine. If you want to find out which one is faster, install PassMark benchmark software and run it, will give you a video card score.