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Can you use non-HPE 2.5" drives in a DL32- G11 server? I’ve seen drive caddies/trays for sale but I know things have changed over the years (used to do this all the time).

I’m wanting to create a nice backup server with lots of TB’s. There are so many good 2.5" drives in extremely large sizes.

2 Spice ups
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Can you use non-(brand) drives in a (model number) comes up a lot.

The answer is yes, but with caveats.

You may get false positive readings, you may get failures when there are no issues, you may have problems with the drives firmware and controllers firmware, you wont be supported by the maker.

3.5" drives are also cheaper and larger capacities. For a backup server this would likely be an easier option, but given your purpose is backup - you have the option of giving it a go with non HCL drives and seeing how you go.

Personally, data is the key to your business, disks would be the thing not to cheap out on, unless you have multiple copies of the data in multiple places (which you should in any 3-2-1 backup anyway).

TL:DR, they will likely work, without official support, there may be false alerts, speed issues or crashes, high fan noise etc.
If you’re happy to accept this, go ahead.

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You can use third party drives as Rod stated. We have in the past as replacements. If you go that route make sure use enterprise grade drives. For the caddies look up the Hpe capacity you are looking for and look to see if it is used in an older model as they do change them from time to time.

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But in addition to what @Rod-IT have said about getting false positives…
What type of drives are you looking at ? Then what kind of backup as well ?

SATA & SAS HDDs might be cheaper nowadays, but if you are backing up large amounts of data especially VMs and using certain technologies like incremental backups…have you considered the restoration strategies & the time involved ?

For example if the VM is only 1TB but have 14 retention points…that might meant the full backup was done 14 days ago…you need the most recent version of the VM (who doesn’t ??)…so its literally restoring 1 full backup, then restoring 14 smaller backups (with verification processes in between the 15 restores)…
Try to imagine the restoration process and time taken…

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Having used non-HP drives what I have found that you will always get a degraded raid warning on the system. If you can live with that , then you can use non-HP drive.