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Hard drives for a HP ProLiant DL120 G7?
Ash_Hawkridge
Member
Pretty self explantory, we are about to start our first build and would like some advise from providers that have done this already, in a time where hard drives cost an arm and a leg where can we find some decent 500GB disks for a HP ProLiant DL120 G7? (E3-1220 Based).
Our usual setup of 15K SAS2 disks is out of the question at the moment :P
Comments
have you got the SFF or LFF drive cages? One option is always to get the caddies of ebay and then buy the disks OEM. Only draw back when using non HP drives is the firmware upgrades.
I guess you are still looking for SAS but maybe 7.2K MDL's or 10K?
Hi @vmhosts,
Thank you for the reply, they are the LFF cages. Nah SAS are out of the question for this build, we will be primarily looking for some enterprise SATA disks.
This will sound a bit crazy but if you want HP drives, I have seen 1TB MDL SAS 7.2K drives around the same price as the 500GB drive (458928-b21) I have just looked for.
Another avenue to keep costs down is to look at HP renew drives. They will come with warranty.
The other thing I can tell you is to avoid any Western Digital eco drives when conencted to a HP raid card. Maybe not all the drives but we used some on a backup server for a week and had no end of problems, I would stick with seagate
Thank you for your advice, its greatly appreciated!
Based or has an E3-1220? I ask because I cannot understand why anyone would actually buy the E3-1220 since it does not have HyperThreading support.
E3-1220 is the standard option with a couple of other options, not sure off the top of my head.
you should be using dell machines HP are crap!!
you should be using supermicro's if anything.
There's on/off rumours that dell has been firmware locking harddrives.
Francisco
@Francisco
Yup the provider we are considering to colocate with also said this (They are a HP partner as well) and apparently if you use anything other than HP drives warranty becomes void even if the issue is not hard-drive related.
Both are built by the lowest bidder, just like a government contract.
It's definately more than a rumor. Our first (and last) Dell R515 with the PERC H700 controller absolutely refuses to use anything other than Dell-branded hard drives. And replacement Dell hard drives are about 400% more $$$ than standard-market enterprise drives.
So if we get this config, we have no choice but to use the HP disks?, even entry-level HP disks are three times as much as other brands (WD, Seagate etc)
+1
Not so, if you look for renew drives which will have full warranty, and in our experience be more reliable as they have actually been tested
OEM drives will work on HP cards but you cant run any firmware updates, also had some strange htings happen with those eco drives.
email me michael "at" vmhosts.co.uk and I can put you in contact with a HP reseller we deal with and maybe able to get some good pricing for you
Yep! Run away!
With the kind of densities we've been able to achieve with modern hardware, I kind of regret paying more for rackmount hardware. We could have bought standard tower cases, filled them with Supermicro or Tyan motherboards and other server-grade hardware, and still not used up our space allotment.
This is our next consideration, basically the company we have a finance agreement with only offer HP rack servers, oh and some fujitsu :P
But we can also just get hardware on the agreement, thus in theory we could build something from what they have available but im going to hold my hands up and say its not something i have much experience with since ATM all of our server fleet is ran on leased hardware.
@DanielM
You recommended Dell one minute ago lmao
@vmhosts
Thank you, i will pop you an email through shortly. By the sounds of it we need a HP alternative anyway haha
@Damian4IPXcore
Thats the kind of wave-length im on at the moment as well
I still do. But going by the server you wanted to buy its medium range. And dell pricing aint to bad and its great quality., But Supermicro is premium quality stuff.Not exactly budget friendly
I buy nothing but SuperMicro motherboards, but my loyalty ends there, I usually buy their cases, but not always. I agree they are premium hardware vendors, but disagree about budget friendly comment, they are extremely budget friendly, and their cases last forever! I have cases 6+ years old I still use and swap parts around as newer is needed, try that with HP/Dell junk. I wouldn't rate Dell/HP as even moderate quality, and it's not a friendly purchase process either.
Our only other option is a HP ProLiant ML110 G6 X3430 setup, which can use HDs other than HP :P. Suggestions?
What raid card would you be using through?
If you are hosting VM's on this you are going to need a raid card with BBWC, and if you want it to be supported in this box it will have to be HP and then you are back needing HP drives if you want support and firmware upgrades etc
Why would you want to use X3430's though?
I was just saying that's the other option and I would say there pretty decent machines they just lack hyper threading again.
Add x3450s to that list as well, unfortunately they are in tower form though but hey at least they support hard drives from other manufacturers
Why is HP your only option in this? If this is a colo/buy out, you could just not get a raid card included and just plop in your own? backplanes don't have firmwares (I don't think??) so the firmware checks/etc are being done in the BIOS of the raid controller.
Francisco
@Francisco
I mentioned above that the company we have a finance agreement with only stock HP and Fujitsu rack servers either that or we put our own together with what they have available.
So is it an option to wait a month and switch to paying cash for nodes? I did the leasing thing in the 90's, never again. If I can't pay cash, I don't need it.
If it works out cheaper than renting nodes like we are now (Which it is) then i think its more than worth it, especially since we end up owning the hardware.
Its no different to taking out a business loan.
That is another great option to look at, I just like my cash is king plan. And yes, it is cheaper but also, you can shop around, you don't always need new everything to build a node, there are plenty of perfectly good and still usable parts to put into a node on the used/pulls market.
+1 on this. We just bought a couple of used HP DL385 G6 with dual Opterons 2427's, 24gb of ram, redundant power supplies, but no drives, for less than $500 apiece from our supplier. If we had tried to buy something similar new, it would have been a few $k.
@miTgiB
Cash is king there is no doubt about that, but if its not available, its not available. I actually pride myself on getting as far as we are now and still been debt-free, hell i started VMPort with under £250 savings.
But we are in the situation now we want to go that step further, when we worked out this finance option it would see us cutting down monthly outgoings by almost 50% and we would be buying the actual hardware in that price, not just renting it.
That said, i am looking at other options thanks to some advice in this thread, maybe a business loan could be the right way to go about it even if they only give us a small amount (If anything) replacing just two of our rented servers is going to save us money and give us more control over our configurations.
I understand that shopping around and putting bits together from different sources would save us even more money, but im fairly new to actually putting hardware together (Manually) and i know for sure i would get something thats not compatible :P