Great Alternative to Replace 15K SAS Drives [UPDATED]

One of the most expensive things to replace on servers these days are the 2.5" 15K SAS drives. Having many HP ProLiant servers at my place of employment, getting these drives from HP is a pricy thing for the average small business. Thanks to some clever work by my company's System Administrator, we found a great alternative if you don't care to or do not have warranty coverage for your servers.

It seems to me that the most expensive thing to replace in servers today is the spinning disks. My company has many HP ProLiant servers including the 360, 380 and 580 series servers. The modern generations of these servers, the G6, G7 and Gen8, all utilize the 2.5" 15,000 rpm SAS drives from either Seagate or Hitatchi. When looking at the 146GB sizing of these drives, I typically see pricing from $168 up to $252 per drive for HP name brand drives. Yes, these drives come with HP's warranty but in some cases, that is useless. An example is my company in healthcare. If the drive had ePHI (electronic Patient Health Information), I have to wipe or destroy the drive. If the drive was bad and I can't wipe it, then I have to destroy it. HP will not certify destruction so I have to do it myself thus buying a new drive anyways.

With the majority of warranties covering hardware replacement and the restrictions my team was under, we moved from getting warranties to not getting warranties and just having stores available to change out when problems arise. Now, we needed to tackle the high costs we were seeing. As I said, my Systems Administrator did some digging and searching online and found the Seagate Savvio 15K.2 ST9146852SS Hard Drives. This was an exact replacement for our 146GB 15K SAS drives on our servers. It was a solid replacement spec for spec and the pricing even caught our eye … $96 per drive. You are seeing that correct, $96 per drive. To sweeten the deal even more, I could order these drives off Amazon with my Prime and get them 2 days later in hand. The Amazon vendor selling them, Yobitech, was solid with their customer support and gets my backing for supporting the Prime shipping requirements. They were a pleasure to work with and I will be going back to them with more purchasing.

Are you utilizing your warranties or are other business needs blocking you from using them? What do you think of having stores of spare parts instead of buying warranty programs from vendors? Put your thoughts below in the comments section.

UPDATE: I just noted that the price from Yobitech was $120 per drive. The lower $96 per drive cost is from another vendor. The drives themselves are solid and worth every penny. I am ordering from the new vendor and will update on how the customer service is.