ML350e gen8 & non-HP SATA HDD

[energywave]

Hello, I'm interested in buying the ml350e gen8 server (p/n: 648376-421) and put in 3 HDD to make a RAID-5 (it has the "HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i/512MB FBWC SATA Controller" with 512 MB cache that supports RAID-5).

The point is that I have a low budget (the server itself consumes almost all my budget...) so I wanted to buy Western Digital Caviar RE4 RAID edition SATA drives (p/n: WD1003FBYX) (I know about the timeout problem of normal disks in RAID-5 array).

I cannot find any document or specification that tells me that this is possible! Everything I read try to tell me that I MUST buy only HP disks. The problem is that are very-very expensive! (more than double of Western Digital...)

The point is that if I'll be forced to buy HP disks I'll not buy HP server because it will go out of my budget...

Can someone with some experience in gen8 server clarificate this thing, please? Have anyone tried to put in normal drives? Does the server comes with at least 3 HDD cages where you can put in normal sata drives? Any drawbacks using normal drives?

And with RAM? Are you forced to use HP RAM? I don't thing so because there is Kingston server certified RAM for Proliant ml350e gen8 so... :)

Thank you very much in advance to anyone that will help me understand!

[Goutham_Sabala · Accepted solution]

You can use third party hard drives and third party dimms

Third Party Hard drives - IML will flag the drives as not genuine, drive LED activity will not be controlled by the controller  which may lead to non detection of pre-failure condition of the drives 

Third Party Memory - IML will flag the dimm as Non Smart Memory . Correctable/uncorrectable threshold may not be accurately logged in SPD data, though I must say you can use G6/G7 memory however it will still flag as Non Smart memory.

[energywave]

Thank you for your reply, Goutham_Sabala, it was very helpful!

Only one more info: ok about the led that will not light but will IML generate other kind of warning like sending a mail? If that's the case that's could be perfectly acceptable.

Thank you again!

[Goutham_Sabala]

What HP does to the hard drives is have a HP firmware so that it can talk to the HP Smart array controller to send the alerts, control the led activity, control the temperature on the drive, and also to log prefailure/failure alerts to IML , if you buy a 3rd party drives I doubt if the controller will be able to achieve what a HP drive can

[energywave]

Thank you for your reply but that seems to be "commercial vaporware"...

I have an older Dell server with RAID 5 controller and very normal SATA disks in the array. It already does what I was asking you...

SATA drives has S.M.A.R.T. functionality built in that allows to monitor temperature and a miriad of parameters made to detect pre-failure conditions... Even my self assembled (no particular HW) desktop PC warned me, last week, about a pre-failure of my disk. I made a backup and replaced the disk, no data loss occured.

Returning to my Dell server it sends e-mail about all kind of alert (disk and memory problem included).

About the RAM, for example, it telled me that I have two dimm module with single and multi bit failure (using ECC). No problem, it excluded the damaged area of the ram and I had no problem, no crash and a minimal available to the system RAM decrease (only damaged area). That in the wait of RAM substitution.

All that with very normal hardware: normal SATA drives and Kingston ECC RAM.

So if HP have that functionality only with HP hardware it's absolutely a commercial vaporware. Or if you want to turn on the front led... paying more than double for that.

That said... thank you for your time :)