Will any SAS drive work in a Dell PowerEdge server?

Question

If I bought a Dell 2950 or 2650, for example, and it has no drives in it (from say an auction). Will any SAS drive I get work in it? I ask because they vary so much in price. Some drives are $150 some are $500. I know they are faster more space, etc. Just wondering if I can get any of these and they will work.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I've had some issues replacing Dell drives with generic equivalents but that has generally been on older servers. Recently I've been able to swap them out with no headache. Occasionally finding the right mounting hardware has been a bit of a pain, but ebay is a wonder for that stuff.

Answer 2

I recently had a SAS drive in a RAID1 array that came with a PowerEdge 2900 about 3 years ago die on me. I just ordered the nearest equivalent drive (original drives were 74GB Seagate 15k RPM drives, minimum size available now is 146GB) and fitted them to the Dell caddies (rebuilding the RAID array of course, one drive at a time).

There is nothing special about the drives that Dell servers use, except for the mounting tray.

You can usually find the mounting trays on eBay, from Dell resellers or from Dell themselves.

Answer 3

There's a few different generations and sizes (2.5" or 3.5") of technology sold under the SAS banner.

When looking at SAS drives drives, the basic specs are RPM (anything from 7,200 to 15,000) and, depending on your usage scenario, I/O operations per second or read bandwidth (i.e. database/web-server versus multimedia server). Then you can make an informed decision about capacity and price :-)

I suspect you will be happy with bigger capacity, but slower spindle speed (aka RPM).