hp proliant dl360 g5 - disk question

[adencool]

were thinking of purchasing a hp proliant dl360 g5. previously we have brought a ml110 g5 which has 4 drive bays (2 had hard disks in caddies installed and there was 2 blank plates)

As the dl360 comes without hard drives does this have blank plates or usable caddies (i.e. i can then buy generic sata / sas hard drives, without the added cost of buying hp's drives)

 

[ntinlin]

No usable caddies are supplied. All but one bays have blanks IIRC.

You could probably buy some off eBay of course. Although I haven't actually seen any of the 2.5" ones on eBay UK.

However I would NOT buy non-HP drives for a new HP server since you lose all the additional advantages of the HP monitoring and pre-failure warranty.

What does suck though is that the std. HP SATA warranty is only 1 year when you can buy generic SATA drives with 2 years and up as standard.
SAS drives get 3 year warranty, same as the server.

Neill

 

[burtsbees]

It's probably SAS drives in a G5...

Burt

 

[cajuntank]

Agree with Neill, spend a few extra dollars on the HP drives. Your spending a little extra money on the better server, in my opinion, than say a Dell...now's not the time to scrimp on a few dollars in regards to the hard drives. Like it was mentioned, HP puts firmware on the drives which allow them to be monitored by the agents so that you can take advantage of their pre-failure notification and warranty. The DL360 actually has 6 drive slots, but only 4 are "enabled" out the box. To get that 5th and 6th drive to work, you'll also have to buy another cable option kit. You didn't mention the function of the server or how many would be accessing it to suggest whether SAS or SATA, but the drive slots take either.

 

[burtsbees]

The RAID controller is a two-channel controller---that's why you need the cable. Out of the box, it can come with it, cajun---depends on the PID. There is only one that would not come with it (base model, I think).
Also, HP drives come with HP firmware, so other 3rd party drives would likely not work anyway. Firmware updates are free, also, and the firmware updates can sometimes bring a failed drive "back to life" (mostly have seen this with 289042-001, 72GB U320 10K, and some 36GB U320's as well).
I have had only 1 SAS drive fail, and we support about 300 servers with SAS drives. I have seen plenty of regular scsi drives fail, and I have seen plenty of SATA drives fail, both 3 1/2" and 2 1/2" drives.

Burt

 

[cajuntank]

I stand corrected, the performance models come with 6 drive slots active, the other models only 4.