SATA drives in HP ProLiant server?

Does anyone know if I can install normal 2.5" SATA drives inside an HP DL360 G5 server? Right now it has 6 72GB SAS drives. I am looking for raw storage for my files SAS performance in not required.

SATA2 disks should be compatible with the Smart Array P400i that comes with your server (or any other SAS controller, for the matter), although probably not with stellar performance as others have noted. But keep in mind that not all SATA disks are suitable for use with RAID because of the infamous Time-Limited Error Recovery parameter (TLER for WD drivers, also called ERC by Seagate and CCTL by others). Disks not prepared for RAID configurations will frequently drop from the array.

I've never had any compatibility issues using SATA disks in HP hardware or with Smart Array controllers.

A better solution may be to use midline SAS drives if you have the budget. They'll still run at 7200 RPM, but still have a SAS interface (and queuing, etc.).

I'd recommend the 2.5" Seagate Constellation drives in either 500GB or 1TB capacities, with a SAS-2 interface. They should be around $200 per disk. The SATA interface versions of the same drives will be about $50 less per disk.

The HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server uses a Smart Array P400i RAID controller in most setups. Performance is helped tremendously if you have a battery-backed write cache unit on the controller. See: Incredibly low disk performance on HP ProLiant DL385 G7

Make sure you update the firmware on your internal Smart Array (P400) RAID controller before doing this. See the HP firmware update page for your model and OS.

SATA drives always work when connected to a SAS controller, by definition.

Minor correction - the SATA drives must be SATA2 or newer (3Gbps) -- from comment below.

Few times I had a problem with SATA drives inside Proliant servers where under Linux drives were detected as PATA.

The solution was to turn off Auto mode for hdd in BIOS settings...