For a while now ive been having some difficulty with 2 of the 1TB drives i have in service for backups here at FurrTrax. There not failing, but they are being indicated as malfunctioning due to an incompatibility with the PERC H700 SAS Controller we have in service to run our RAID Arrays. The disks have been causing the alerting system to flood my email with false malfunction notifications because the drives are not DELL Certified, but the emails dont say that, they just indicate a general malfunction, simular to what an actual drive failure appears as.

This opens us up to potential problems because if a real drive failure is getting ready to occur, that email will just be in with the flood of false positives. Ive been having to check on the disks manually nearly every day just to make sure its those 2 and not any of the others. Making my hardware failure alerts essentially pointless.

These 2 disks are HGST 2.5 inch 1TB Enterprise Class disks used for backups, and as scratch space anytime i want to experiment with new code, or a new project etc. They dont actually house any live running data.

The skinny is we need to get a pair of disks that the controller likes, so it doesnt cry wolf all night untill we actually have a failure. The 2 HGST disks can be used in our DS9 Backup Server and will not go to waste. They are only 6-7 months old when i bought them out of pocket. All of our other 8 disks are Dell Supported SSDs and dont have this issue.

Here is a link to the Dell site showing reference of the issue were having, we have already updated the firmware, and the drives to function, but the controller still endlessly complains about them having errors
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19504074

Depending on how much we can raise, will decide whether i get 2 SSDs which would be ideal, or 2 more rotational disks that are dell certified.

This is the pricing i got from my Parts Connection:
Dell Certified Seagate SAS Disks, 10,000 RPM
146GB = $15
300GB = $40
600GB = $90
1TB = $110
My connection is a datacenter manager so they buy the disks in bulk hence the pricing is a bit better than most other places.

If anyone can donate any amount to assist with this, it would be greatly appreciated.  You will recieve the usual donator perks as well.

So question out of curiousity but in total, are we looking at a cost of $220 or will this cost more?

I was going to see how much we could raise and get whatever set it covers.  $220 would be the maximum we would need unless we went to SSDs.  obviously the bigger the better, the more backups we can retain.

For SSDs we have discovered several good models that the controller supports and works very very well with:
Patriot Blast 480GB SSD - $130 on Amazon.  We already have 2 of these in service.
Patriot Ignite 480GB SSD - We had one of these in service, i pulled it to use for my laptop when its HDD failed, it was not used much at the time.
Patriot Blaze Models - We have 4 of these in service, not as fast as the Blast or Ignite models, but just as reliable thus far.
PNY XLR8 Models - We have heard of controller issues with these, but ours has been as rubust as can be, it runs our Firewall Systems.

Mushkin, PNY CS Models, OCZ Trions, and numerous others are known to have compatibility issues with Dell SAS Controllers.

We have heard Kingstons and Intels should work well, but we have never had one to test, thus we would rather not roll the dice since we have several models we know work well.

Spartan has 8 Front Side 2.5inch Drive Bays numbered 0-7, and 4 Rear 2.5 Drive Bays numbered 8-11.

The new drives would replace those in 6 and 7, still leaving us 2 empty bays for future expansion without removing anything.