Switch SATA disks in DELL PowerEdge R410

1: You should have no problems swapping existing disks for your own disks, as long as they're of the same interface

2: Unless something has drastically changed, empty drive bays have blank faceplaces installed to improve airflow, but do not come with empty drive carriers. You will have to order the drives from Dell to fill them, or get them from Ebay. I believe your R410 is newer, so you'll have more difficulty. You might be able to find resellers by searching Google.

3: No particular problems jump out with the exceptions of reliability and performance hits if you only have one spindle. If you purchase additional drive carriers and use a RAID layout, you'll get better performance (if you plan your RAID right, anyway) than is possible with only one drive. Not to mention that single-drive failure in your situation would seriously cramp your style.

On a Poweredge R410. if you buy the cabled version at it's cheapest, it comes with 4 (3 empty and 1 full) drive trays that come precabled for more drives. You do not need to buy any extra drives or cables.

The only thing that you need to find are beveled Hard drive srews because the R410 has a rather peticular screw size.
I have 10 R410's and have added my own drives to all of them.

EDIT I have had the problem, that the R410 comes precables for SAS drives(which is compatible with sata drives). My problem was that I have velociraptors the (GLFS series) that have a repositioned sata connection that won't fit with the SAS interface.