DL320G6 with non HP harddisks

[Rene 404]

We are thinking of buying a HP DL320G6 with the B110i controller. Unfortunately the biggest SATA disk HP have currently is only 1TB, we need bigger disks.

Does somebody have experience with running on non-HP disks? We are thinking of the WD RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS). We will use Solaris and ZFS with RAIDZ.

Will non-HP disk works? Or is there some kind of check that it only works with HP disks?

Is there a part number for the HP hot-plug brackets only? Otherwise we shall need to buy the cheapest HP disk and replace the disk to use the bracket.

[Alex Geroulaitis]

The short answer yes, and here is the longer version:

I did quite a bit of testing with DL380 G5 and P400 controller (8 2.5" SAS/SATA bays), using HP SAS disks for the first two bays, and various 7200rpm and even 5400rpm (gasp!) dirt cheap notebook (gasp!) drives for the remaining 6 bays. Certain 5400rpm drives (Toshiba MK2546GSX, specifically) would occasionally (two such incidents over 4 months in a 24/7 server) get marked as "failed" by the controller, while ALL the remaining ones (Seagate, Fujitsu, WD, Hitachi) performed pretty much flawlessly.

Unlike IBM, HP array management utilities do not mark non-HP drives with yellow exclamation marks, "how COULD you invite these regular folks into our royal palace?!". In other words, HP utilities do not seem to object to using 3rd party drives - but of course you need to be mindful of HP warranty and support.

I haven't tried WD RE4-GP specifically, but most likely, it will work as a champ.

HP does not sell their hot-plug trays separately; I bought a few for under $10 a pop - on ebay.