Personal log of yet another digital native.
tl/dr: they’re both the same and one can be turned into the other. It’ll run flawlessly on Truenas (the new freenas), OMV, unRAID etc.
Longer:
A H310 and an LSI 9211 are exactly the same, save for OEM firmware. Typically the OEM variants of cards are focussed on being RAID (or IR) cards where the original designer (LSI, now broadcom) made a range of cards that were flexible with being a RAID (IR) or HBA (IT) by changing only the firmware. Take a look here for equivalences and notes on what can be turned into what
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind…and-hba-complete-listing-plus-oem-models.599/
If you just want ports you can use RAID or HBA but the HBA is simpler. In a RAID (even ones advertised with JBOD modes) card you’ll typically need to make each disk an array of its own. With an HBA, they’ll just appear to the operating system. You can also flash firmware only and not the BIOS to a card to make booting faster if you just want ports available after boot (ie not needing to boot from one of the disks attached to the card) if you want. This can save many minutes of boot time for some cards if that’s important to you.
An HBA will also get you SMART data from an attached SATA disk, where you can’t generally get that from a RAID attachment.
I’ve used a lot of LSI cards from various OEMs including IBM and fujitsu, but i’ve not used an H310. I do have an H810 however which i cross flashed to an LSI SAS2308 HBA but it involved sticky tape over some pins since I didn’t have a dell server to plug it into. I don’t think you’ll have that problem with an H310. Simplest answer to your question is to use the link I provided, find an HBA card with the number of ports and position of the ports that you want and then buy the cheapest variant you can find.
LSI SAS 9211-8i has OEM model LSI SAS 9210-8i and also a single port version LSI SAS 9211-4iLSI SAS 9211-8i