Hi I have a HP Datavault X510, its been a bit of a pain with multiple disk failures and a motherboard failure. However I like it as its small and fairly silent.

Originally the X510 came with WHS v1 but I rebuilt it with WHS2011. When I first configured it I used 4 Western Digital WD15EARS disks it but these have been a disaster. There is a lot on the web about these drives so I wont bore you with details except to say that 3 of mine have failed and the remaining one is failing and not in use.

At the moment I am running my X510 with a single Hitachi 2GB disk, this came from Tesco as an external Disk and it cost £57, I took it home ripped of the enclosure and stuck the disk it in my server, its been working fine for about 3 months.

But I want to add some more disks and I am looking from some recommendations for reasonably priced disks that are known to work well with WHS2011, preferably in the later HP Media Centre WHS boxes like the X510. I woudl prefer 1.5-2 TB disks.

Suggestions gratefully received.

Hi wytco0 welcome to the forums.

I have been running WHS now for close to 4 yrs and I have several EX470 MSS, an HP ProLiant DL145 with a wide range of PortMultipliers attached to it and I have 2 DIY Builds running WHS2011 with over 32 hard drives spread accross all my servers. While many people use the Green Drives I stopped using them and started replacing or repurposing them. I purchase either WD Black or Hitachi Deskstar hard drives in past I have used WD Green Drives, Samsung and WD Blue as well. I have only had one real drive failure and that was with a new WD Black but I RMA'd the drive and the experience was very good with WDC.

Others will have their opinions on which drives work best but what I tell people is just chose a drive which best fits your confort level. Hard Drive prices are starting to drop but are still expensive. I think if you can put your purchase off until the summer the prices should return to normal but this is only my gut feeling and I am hoping the drive prices will be stable by then because I had a desire to purchase more drives.

In the mean time I do urge you to read through the forums and see what others have to say about particular drives and pay close attention to which version of WHS they are running. Because of WHS v1 and DE one could say it runs the drives more aggressively than WHS2011 so you should be able to run Green Drives in WHS2011 more successively than in WHS v1. For me I chose to stick with 7200 RPM Drives be it WD Black or Hitachi Deskstar but this is my personal prefrence based on my comfort level.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

I have the original 1Tb disk for the system and 3 x 1.5Tb WD15EADS internal disks, these have been great for several years (finger crossed that they'll be fine for while yet. Ive just added 2x 2Tb external Seagate USB disks. I'm thinking about retiring all the disks shortly though, so would also be interested to hear what folks have found to work well.

Im still running the original whs v1 installation though, not whs2011, on my x510.

I've had WD green and numerous Seagate's low power line fail. I no longer buy "green" hard drives for any of my systems

I've had the best luck with the Hitachi and Samsung drives, and generally stick with them. I have 8 of the Hitachi 3TB drives spread around and love 'em.

And I've had enough failures with SATA drives and am getting tired of them to the point that from now on, any new systems I build or new drives I add to machines that will support them will be SAS. Yup, theres about a 20% premium but SAS drives are generally much better built - the biggest difference is most SATA drives only have one bearing on the main axel the disks spin on while SAS drives have bearings on the top and bottom - the drives are much, much more sturdier. It doesn't hurt that the drives can be significantly quicker too

And I have also learned my lesson - I now gladly pay a little more for retail, boxed drives - even if bare internals. I bought my last two seagate drives bare from Newegg (who still doesn't know how to properly ship bare hard drives!) so Seagate referred me back to NewEgg for warranty since Newegg is the "OEM" I got the drives from. Newegg's warranty is nowhere near as long as the Seagate warranty. D'oh!