Rob Pleak,
I'm not sure of the beneficial configurations possible on the onboard LSI 2308 other than setting up RAID volumes, and offering the ability to use, I think, 16 SAS drives. SEE:
https://www.servethehome.com/lsi-sas-2308-raid-controller-hba-information-listing/
SAS drives are durable in constant use and have improved pre-failure diagnostics for big datasets -servers- nd can have faster access rates and superior transfer rates to SATA. We use some 10K and 15K SAS drives in the office server, but they're smaller capacity- 300 and 600GB- and more costly per GB. In general use, there's probably not a lot in it unless it's a big 1+0 array of some kind with 8 drives. Anyway, SSD's are so fast- and there are a lot of 1TB for realistic prices,.. An M.2 can solve everything!
You might consider updating /reinstalling the drivers and firmware.
http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=wk_139532_1
The LSI2308 is an HBA without cache, so if you want high performance with a lot of drives, you might look into using SAS drives on an LSI 9260 which has 512MB cache.
Cheers,
BambiBoomZ