Greetings,
A while back there was a known issue with the SAS controller. Each chip that controlled 2 ports would only address 128 devices. That included shelf controllers so technically 5 ds2246 shelves would exceed the limit and could cause some slowness.
I was told that they changed this behavior in 8.1 and possibly upgrading the firmware, so that it only kept active devices in the list. I was told those devices would be removed when not active and so there was no need to keep the smaller shelf limit.
Is this the case, or do I still need to try to limit each chip to 5 shelves or less? I'm running 8.1.2P4 and the cards are running 01.11.00.00.