Can you use your own drives on Dell PowerVault MD3000i?

Solution 1:

There are only a limited number of drives that are certified - non certified drives wont be recognized by the array and will not work even if they are otherwise identical to the drives already in the array. For SATA drives you will also need an interposer that allows the MD3000i controller to interface with the SATA drives. If you can precisely match the drive type and firmware revision then the array will definitely recognize the drives but you may have trouble with support later if they see that the array configuration does not match their records.

I've never tried it though and its not the sort of thing to just take a chance on. As David Collantes says you should get Dell to confirm whether they will support this or not and I'd add that if they say it's OK then get that in writing . I would be surprised if they do but they might be flexible given the entry level nature of the MD3Ki, what I can say for certain is that they do not support non-Dell supplied drives on their Equallogic range.

Solution 2:

My own experience with other vendors has been that they will swear up and down that other drives won't work...then, of course, I tried it, and it worked fine.

Of course, if this is for enterprise usage, you should not use your own. The reason is that the drives that they sell (with the high markup) have specific firmwares that disable disk caching, and probably other things that I'm not aware of.