HPDL380G5 drive question

[Cr0nJ0b]

Hey guys.

I have a DL380 G5 with mirrored 36GB boot drives on one of the smart array controllers.

My question is...can I just put any 36GB drive in to replace the lost one or do I need to go with an OEM HP drive. I don't care too much about pre-failure warings and the like, since it's at home, non-production and the drives are mirrored...I just hate having to pay such a premium for 36GB.

Also, if I replace the drives (both of them) with non HP drives, will that matter?

thanks in advance.

 

[Emulex]

nah you can put in a modern 146/300/600/900gb just make sure its the same brand ie seagate if that's what you have now.

SAS is SAS. you can buy pir8 sleds on ebay fro $10-15 - i just setup a ML370 with 8 RE4 2TB SATA drives and its been rocking esxi solid - just slow as butt. too slow for vmware.

remember to use SAS drives of the same speed - most of the drives that were 36gb were single-ported and the new ones are dual-ported but that won't matter it's backwards compatible.

so find the cheapest new seagate (if your current is seagate) sas drive. probably 72 or 146gb (up to 900gb now in 2.5" or 3.5"!) sas 10K or 15K - matched speed and go to town.it will be cool.

I have 8x146gb sas drives in my dl380 g5 with P400 with 256mb BBWC. I strongly suggest if possible replace your batttery about now - its been 3 years and it should be dead. If you don't have the 256 or 512meg and Battery - get one! you'll be so sad without it.

another fact: The Dl380 G6/G7 P410i controller is 30% faster than the P400i on the G5 with the same drives !! took them out and plopped them into a G7 and disk iops went way up! plus flash back write cache - no battery to die ever again!

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Hey,

thanks for taking the time to respond. I kind of figured that there wouldn't be an issue, but i remember a time where HP/Compaq was doing some funky stuff with firmware on their drives to keep out competitors.

I'll likely stick with the one 36GB, until it's time to move to VMware 5.0. Then I'll add in a couple of the 10K SAS drives and start from there.

thanks again.

 

[Emulex]

each oem tunes the drives and controllers for best performance - but at the end of the day its still mostly an lsi controller and a seagate drive. i've been testing RE4 2TB with P400 for a while and its being super solid 8 of them in raid-10 with BBWC - but it's too slow to do certain tasks in vmware. you just have to use 10/15K sas drives - no comparison.