Hello all.

I'm looking to add some additional storage to my Dell PowerEdge server. I am looking at 3rd party drives due to their lower price point.

I have mostly been looking at enterprise class drives (all SATA here) due to the longer warranties and their full support of the SATA interface command sets. I have concerns about which drives may or may not work with Dell's PERC controller. Based on some research I believe that Dell is currently using Hitachi drives in thier systems, which led me first to look at those. Currently I am looking at the following drives:

Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000 series
WD Caviar RE2 series
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 series (7200.11)

Someone also pointed out the Samsung F1, however this isn't an enterprise class drive. Although it may work fine, I need to ensure full SATA set compatibility like NCQ and hot-swapping, etc.

These drives will be used in a RAID 5 array in a server running VMWare (ESX). This is mostly a test server and will only be accessed by a couple of people.

My concerns that I would like answered are the following:
1) Anyone have experience using 3rd party drives in newer Dell servers? What brands were you successful with?

2) How different are the enterprise class drives (ES.2, RE2, Ultrastar) from thier counterparts (ES, RE, Desktar)? Am I overly concerned with using these cheaper consumer class drives? Are they actually less reliable? I have read reports that they are tuned differently, support more technologies, and of course they come with longer warranties and are reported to have greater MTBF.

3) Which of these drives would perform best for my application? RAID5, multiple-user environment (VMWare).

Thank you!