Reddit reviews Monoprice 1m 28AWG External Mini SAS 26pin (SFF-8088) Male to Mini SAS 26pin (SFF-8088) Male Cable - Black
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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a high-speed data storage interface designed for high-throughput and fast data accessIntended primarily for data storage centers the SAS interface is backwards compatible with SATAThis 1 meter long cable uses 28 AWG wires and is intended for external use
My original setup went like this:
I have an IBM m1015 I picked up off of eBay and flashed to IT mode so that the drives are passed straight through and no RAID functionality of the card is used.
One of the two ports from it was connected via an SFF-8087 SAS cable to a double SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adapter, but you can go single as well.
Then an SFF-8088 SAS Cable ran from the adapter to an external case with an HP SAS Expander in it. There are many, many, other models of expanders but this is what I went with because it has the external SAS SFF-8088 port on it (it's not the only one that has this feature, but it's what I went with, and it makes it so every enclosure doesn't need its own motherboard).
All the ports off the expander then went to the backplanes in the external case and connected the drives to the IBM m1015 through the expander.
Since the 4224 did not have a motherboard at the time I used this thing that's usually used for crypto currency mining to provide power to the expander because that's all it needs from its PCIe interface (many of those other models of expander have a Molex connector in it for power and no PCIe interface at all).
As for daisy chaining SAS enclosures, it can be done, but I haven't gotten that far in my storage adventures yet. I do know that there are enclosures that support it and if I were to expand from where I'm at now it's probably the route I would go. Rolling my own was fun and all but sometimes you just want to plug and play.
I'll concur with A_watcher that eSATA enclosures are crap. Or at least the one I've used was as well.
I think that address the questions that were in the OP as well as posed to others that responded.
I'm ridiculously far from an expert, and my setup has changed a lot since the first way it was set up, but I think it was pretty close and answered those questions.
*Many the guys over at /r/datahoarder are much more knowledgeable in this arena than I am and are another source of information when it comes to storage.