I'm trying to find out if Non Hot Swap
drives can be plugged into Hot Swap slots on a HP DL180 G6 server. I've been searching
around but haven't found the answer I am looking for. I also can't find the manual for
the server before we buy one.
Reason for this is
because HP drives cost like they have gold in them. I can get 2TB WD black's for like
$150 locally. The question is, will 2TB WD black's
work?
Yes we are saving money and no this will
not host mission critical data. It will only store videos.
Answer
For modern drives (SAS / SATA),
HP's "Hot swap" and "Non-hot swap" drive designations refer to the type of drive caddy
(** and controller) used, rather than anything particular about the drive. All SATA and
SAS drives are electrically hotswappable. (For SCSI and IDE disks, there was a real
difference - only SCA SCSI disks were hotswappable, nothing else
was)
So, if you have the correct disk caddies
already, you can physically and electrically put in third-party drives just
fine.
Whether the controller in your DL180 G6
will support a 2TB drive or not is another question, and one I don't know the answer to.
It may require specific firmware on the drives, for example. Sorry I can't help you
there.
As a side point, I've seen a lot of
issues with non-RE ("RAID Edition") class WD disks when used in hardware RAID
controllers. The RE disks have a feature called Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER)
( rel="nofollow noreferrer">datasheet for RE4 disk), which basically means
the drive gives up a lot earlier when it encounters some errors. Without this reduced
error timeout, the disk stalls for longer, which results in the array controller
thinking the disk is having a problem and subsequently removing it from the array. Your
mileage may vary on this point - but if you find that the disks are being ejected from
their RAID set without any obvious reason, you might be seeing this
issue.
Updated to add: I think I still wasn't
clear in my comment. There is no physical or electrical reason why you can't use any
non-HP SAS or SATA disks in this system, because all SAS and SATA disks are hot-swap
anyway.
Even the HP "non-hot swap"
disks are technically hot-swappable, however the disk controller or back-plane in the HP
systems with NHS disks may not support hot-swapping.
So, barring an unforeseen controller/firmware
limitation, you should be fine.
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