No problem. I appreciate everyone's help.
If I understand rightly, there are no physically different 8x sockets, its just that some of the conectors are not in use or carrying signals. The board has the four 8/16x, two 1x and one old PCI. I'll have to dispense with the Fireware card, since I need the PCI slot for the 4-port external RAID card.
I can't figure out the SATA ports yet. I only see two onboard SCSI and RAID devices in Windows (GB36x), which are the pair of internal and external J-Microns controls. There should be a Marvell 6GBps controller in there too. I don't really need it with the 9211-8i though.