Second MD1000 questions

Hello,

I have a few questions that an expert should be able to answer quite easily regarding stacking MD1000 units.

We currently have 1 MD1000 connected to a PERC 6 card with 2 SAS cables.  We are looking to daisy chain a second MD1000 unit from the first unit.  We already know that this is possible and this is not part of our questions.

1) As the second unit is solely connected through the first MD what happens to the connectivity of MD2 if MD1 was to fail?  The same question applies if MD1 was suddenly turned off. Would MD2 lose connection with the PERC card?  We believe the answer is yes but we are looking for confirmation.

2) Both MD units will be full of SATA drives but the second question pertains to SAS throughput bottle necking.  With two MD units connected to 1 PERC6 card would there be an inherent bottleneck occurring?  Would the entire setup be slower since the PERC SAS controller is being dragged down by two units as opposed to one?

3) While in the PERC BIOS we will be creating a second VD is there any risk to the existing data on MD1? Is there any valid reason that we should have a full backup before attaching and configuring the second unit?  We want to ensure that we can connect and configure MD2 without any risk to MD1.

4) Both MD units are being controlled by the single PERC controller but they would show as two separate LUN's in the BIOS?  Would these two units show as one or two volumes in Windows Server?  We are looking to have Windows see only 1 if possible so that we can create one gigantic volume.. regardless of GPT limitations we are curious as to how MD1+MD2 would show up in Windows.  On a secondary question if the MD1 volume already exists in Windows how would the MD2 mix into that?  Would it simply show up as additional space that we need to diskpart?

5) Can a SATA drive be directly connected to the back plane or is an interposer required? (we have not tested this). To be more specific, If we place a SATA drive into a SAS caddy and install the drive.. will that work or is the interposer helping back plane communication to help the MD understand SAS emulation?

My apologies for so many questions but we want to be very careful.  We already have 11TB of live data and need to migrate 30TB more into the mix and losing data is not an option.  Backing up 11TB+ is not easy so we want to know as much information as possible before proceeding.

Thank you to anyone who has experience with any of these topics and can provide sound guidance (not opinions).