Has anyone had experience using Western Digital UltraStar HC550 or Seagate EXOS X20 20TB SAS drives in a Dell PowerEdge 740xd server? I'm aware that previously, when I worked at another company, we faced issues with 16TB drives in HPE servers, as they required specific BIOS versions for non-HPE branded drives. My company is looking to order 60 drives, and the Dell-branded options are quite expensive compared to the WD or Seagate alternatives. I'd appreciate any insights or experiences you have regarding this situation!
6 Answers
I've successfully used non-Dell drives from various brands like Seagate, Samsung, Intel, and WD in all my Dell servers (both 14G and 15G) without running into issues.
I've put Seagate Exos drives in a 740xd before without any big issues. They might show up as non-certified in iDRAC and trigger some drive health alerts, but they worked perfectly fine otherwise.
In my experience with R730s and R720s, I’ve used non-Dell drives too. The only drawback was seeing warning statuses in OpenManage about the non-Dell drives, which could be an issue depending on your monitoring setup.
I've never had problems using regular brand drives in Dell servers. I usually avoid buying drives directly from Dell when I can help it.
There was a bit of drama with the R720 and its H700 controller, but Dell eventually released a firmware update to support non-Dell drives. So, I think you'll be fine with your 740xd.
We use Seagate EXOS drives in various Dell servers and haven’t encountered any problems. Not the exact model you mentioned, but we’ve had different models running smoothly.
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