It finally came to look like this card was included in Dell SC tower servers ... apparently, firmware to control fan speed (or firmware that didn't blast the fans merely because a card was present) was dealt with on those MOBO's where this card was actually shipped with the system. Then, I was reading the release notes for the Dell 2850 BIOS A07 release, and if you look down to A06 notes, you see that they programmed the BIOS to run the fans faster if a RAID card is present. Looks like they made this happen on purpose due to some heat issues ... perhaps card failures were being reported to Dell at the time.

Personally, I think they went overboard - or just did a bad job - as others have pointed out, when you get the 2850 fans going almost full speed like this it sounds like a tornado crashing into a hurricane during a nuclear explosion. Dell Support says ... well ... sorry! that's a very old system, and the engineers have just moved on.

Finally, I had to take the card out. What I'm going to do is cable my Channel B of my on-board SCSI controller back through one of the PCI slots and run that out and to my HP StorageWorks array ... driving the array from the on-board PERC should keep the system nice and quiet.

As Daniel said, SAS/SATA is not an option on the 2850, unless you have one of the VERY few 2850 II's to ship, which also seem to have only been available in Europe. The parts are not compatible (backplane, motherboard, etc.), so upgrading a 2850 I to a II cannot be done.