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So instead of replacing drives with used dell branded what is the general consensus on HGST Ultrastar enterprise drives?

Both dell and HGST drives will be used and not new so if all things being the same then i figure why not., They served me well in my R210 II. and HGST drives are way cheaper.

Specifically 3TB Ultrastar 7K4000 64MB Cache 7200RPM SATA III 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive

Its much cheaper to use the HGST and they are supposedly enterprise class drives made for 24/7 use.

before i decide to buy more im curious as to what other professionals may say about this idea.

5 Spice ups
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What disk controller is installed in the R710? Most likely it has dual four-channel SAS/SATA connections.
If you use SATA instead of SAS, then you lose the ability to maintain business continuity (BC) if the disk backplane fails and also lose the ability to effectively double the disk throughput from 6 Gbps (SATA) to 12 Gbps (SAS).

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I prefer HGST over any other brand, if I have a choice. One major caveat with Dell HW is that some newer PERC FW appears to whitelist SAS drives explicitly and will refuse to recognize something that isn’t on the internal HCL. This happened with an H310 and Toshiba drives, which were purchased at around 25% cheaper than the comparable Dell (Seagate) units. I haven’t run into this with SATA drives yet, although I usually have to dig up or buy new drive sleds for expansion.

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H700 . Its should do sata. Right?
Like for instance there is one i like for sale with h700 says its for SAS… and both sata. So technically i can pop in a sata drive no problem without changing backplane. I plan on using hgst 3tb drives hopefully get them to run at sata IIII speeds .iirc perc6 only allows for SATA II 3Gbps and 2Tb capacity…i hope im on the right track here.

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Hi,

Make sure that the H700 firmware is up to date. The H700 does support both SAS and SATA drives. That drive should work.

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I have an H700 driving three WD RED SATA drives, so I would expect the HGST SATA drives to be OK.

I’m not sure, but I think there’s a restriction on mixing SATA and SAS drives in a volume. If that is your intent, please look into it / prove me wrong before you get in too deep.

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HGST is generally regarded as the most reliable as a brand overall, but different models and production runs from a number of companies will vary. Seagate, for example, has a higher failure rate but is notably cheaper.

BackBlaze has a good quarterly review of their HDD reliability at 2016 Hard Drive Failure Rates for 2TB - 8TB Drives

Note that the raw failure rates are not the best data, as that includes drives that have not operated for a full year yet. The annualized failure rate is a better metric.

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thanks for the info guys. Im glad to know aftermarket will work with the raid controller.