Questions about SAS and HP Proliant DL380 G4 servers...

[TheOmega]

I recently obtained a few HP Proliant DL380 Generation 4 servers. Unfortunately the hard disks were not included when I received them, and I am looking to replace them. The manual says that up to 72GB drives are supported, but I have found this to be inconsistent with a few google searches. My questions are:

1. Does it matter what SAS drive I install if I can obtain hotswap drive cages?
2. Do I have to use SAS or could I "mod"(in some way) my server to run SATA Drives with a SATA controller or something.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[choucove]

First, confirm that the server you have supports SAS and not SCSI hard drives. This generation could be configurable with either, SAS was in its earlier phases during this generation of the HP servers from what I can tell.

if it is a server that supports SAS, then good news is it should also support SATA disks. SAS controllers are compatible with SATA drives and communication protocols, but SATA controllers are not all compatible with SAS drives and communication protocols. There may be some additional limitations such as total drive capacity or array capacity maximum sizes that are recognized by the array controller, but I'm not too sure on that end for the specifics. If you have a single spare SATA hard drive that you can put into a drive cage and then boot up the server and see if, in the RAID controller configuration utility, it recognizes the attached drive.

 

[TheOmega]

It looks like I mis-identified the interface for the array. They are all SCSI connections. Any idea on how I could get SATA drives in? There isn't a SATA or Molex power connector inside, so I don't know how I could get power to them.

Thanks again.

 

[choucove]

Really, there's not going to be any feasible way. You'd need to replace the RAID controller and cabling, the entire drive cage assembly and backplane, and I'm not sure what else may be involved to get that converted over.