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Are HP Gen8 servers (namely DL380 Gen8 with 2.5" HP disks) compatible with 2.5" harddrives from G5-G7 servers? I mean original HP disks in HP caddies not plain SAS/SATA drives.

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No, they're not compatible sorry - they're in different caddies - obviously the disks themselves are regular SAS or SATA but they come in different packaging and one won't physically slot into the other.

By the way, there's no such things as a DL380 Gen8, it's either a DL380e or DL380p - but it doesn't matter for this question.

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    wait a second - so you are saying if i got the new caddies or some chinese knockoff - are the LFF drives different? or just the same old drives. ie when times were tough we only could source MSA drives, rip them out of their caddy and throw them into DL380G7's with a "ebay caddy" which worked awesome. So - Again is the drive physically thinner (2.5? 3.5?) - i doubt the hitachi 7K3000,7K4000 have gotten thinner - what's the deal? i can understand they may have moved to thinner 2.5" (9mm instead of 14mm) but 3.5" not alot of space?
    – user126169
    Jun 27, 2012 at 11:45
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    They're the same 2.5" raw disks, but different caddies. Don't be ridiculous, though. You're paying for high-end server equipment. Do the right thing and buy the vendor drives for 1) support 2) firmware and 3) to leverage the management features available with the Gen8 hardware. Also, exceptional pricing on HP hardware is available if you look in the right places. You shouldn't resort to using cannibalized disks.
    – ewwhite
    Jun 27, 2012 at 12:58
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To add to the above comments, we purchased just short of 30 new HP Gen8 Servers for a cluster we are running and I can confirm that hard drives themselves are the same/standard 2.5" disks but the caddies ARE different.

They are a new smart caddy with a chip inside - HP aren't selling these individually without drives, but they have just been released through wholesale channels including http://www.ebuyer.co.uk and http://www.servercaddies.co.uk - neither had enough stock when I needed them though.

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If we are talking about hard drives then that would be dependent on your controller. SAS and SATA are standards. It would not depend on the generation of your server but what type of disk it is using.

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I've found that with a bit of pursuasion the caddies will slide into the new servers slots. The caddies however do hang out about a cm from the front of the machine. Also the smart array software says they are degraded due to not being official hp drives. I've not noticed any problem with the drive speeds being affected.

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    That's a terrible idea.
    – ewwhite
    Aug 25, 2012 at 15:54
  • Yeah, this is such a terrible idea, I feel compelled to second what ewwhite said with an upboat and a "me too" comment.
    – HopelessN00b
    Aug 26, 2012 at 3:18
  • only a hammer is missing...
    – Hubert Kario
    Oct 1, 2012 at 7:47

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