Server Hard Drives
Server hard drives are the spinning disks built for continuous duty in rack and tower servers, disk shelves and SANs. This category holds 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SAS and SATA drives, from 10K and 15K RPM performance models to high-capacity 7.2K nearline drives, in both OEM-branded form (HPE, Dell, EMC and NetApp, usually in a carrier) and as bare HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital drives. Interfaces run from 3Gb/s SATA through 6Gb/s and 12Gb/s SAS, and many listings name the array or server family the drive was qualified for, such as EMC Unity DAEs.
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Server Hard Drives: 17,322 products
Buying guide
Choosing server hard drives
SAS or SATA
SAS controllers and backplanes generally accept SATA drives as well, but SAS drives do not work on SATA-only controllers.
2.5-inch or 3.5-inch
Small form factor (SFF, 2.5-inch) and large form factor (LFF, 3.5-inch) bays take different drives and carriers. A 2.5-inch drive fits a 3.5-inch bay only with an adapter carrier.
Carrier (tray)
OEM drives ship in a carrier that matches the server generation. HPE's SmartDrive carriers, used from Gen8 onward, do not fit G7 and earlier bays.
Speed and endurance
10K and 15K RPM SAS drives suit performance workloads; 7.2K NL-SAS and SATA drives suit capacity. SSDs are rated read-intensive, mixed-use or write-intensive by endurance.
Sector format and firmware
Check whether your controller and operating system support 4Kn drives before choosing them over 512n or 512e. OEM drives carry firmware the server's management tools recognize.
Server Hard Drives
Frequently asked questions
Can I put a bare Seagate or HGST drive in my HPE or Dell server?
With the right carrier it will usually fit and spin up, but OEM servers expect their own drive firmware. Management tools may flag a non-OEM drive as unsupported or report its health incompletely, so for production RAID arrays match the OEM part where you can.
Will a 12Gb/s SAS drive work on a 6Gb/s controller?
Yes. SAS is backward compatible, and the link negotiates down to the controller's speed. A spinning disk's sustained throughput is well under 6Gb/s anyway, so you lose little.
What does 512e mean on a drive listing?
512-byte emulation: the drive uses 4K physical sectors but presents 512-byte logical sectors so older operating systems and controllers can use it. 512n is native 512-byte, and 4Kn exposes 4K sectors directly, which needs host support.
