Non HP hard drives on ProLiant DL185-G5

[decibel83_1]

Hi.

I need to install some non-HP hard drives on a HP ProLiant DL185-G5 server (with the chassis which supports 12 hard drives).

Can I do it? Will the DL185-G5 have the bay for all 12 hard drives?
I also need to buy it with a RAID controller which supports the maximum number of hard drives possible.

Could you help me please?

Thank you very much!
Bye.

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

i would not recommend you to use non HP disks,

maybe it will work, but if you have some troble, the support and warranty is gone.

mikap

[rick jones]

Without commenting on questions like whether or not one can get just the trays for the discs or whether or not it would work or be supported, I'll simply provide something on the difference between "works" and "supported" in HPspeak:

Supported, known to work -> warm fuzzies all around
Supported, not known to not work -> an HPite may be in trouble
Supported, known to not work -> an HPite is in trouble
Unsupported, known to work -> lucky today, unlucky tomorrow?
Unsupported, not known to not work -> there but for the grace of Turing
Unsupported, known to not work -> no, it was not deliberate ;-)

[Mark Woodruff]

Pretty much any Seagate Sata or Sas drive works for non-critical data on a development server. There are issues you'll run into, however:

* The controller won't read the temperature sensors from most other drives and will report random temperature readings. You may end up with messages in your event log indicating they are overheating when they are not.

* You have no guarantee how buggy the drive firmware is, and no easy path to upgrade it.

For my personal development machine, I have a mix of disks (including a Plextor SSD), and I'm quite happy with them. For a production environment, I never go with anything but HP drives because I'm not willing to take the risks. You can often get them at reasonable prices on Ebay.

Cheap Sata drives work great for backups though.