Dell PowerEdge SAS Hard Drives — Tray Included

10K/15K SFF and nearline LFF drives for PowerEdge G11 through G15, caddy in the box

About PowerEdge SAS Drives

The most common Dell storage mistake is buying a bare drive and discovering the hot-swap bay needs a caddy that costs another week of downtime. Thousands of our Dell SAS drives ship with the tray installed — pull the failed drive, slide in the replacement, and PERC picks it up immediately.

PowerEdge SFF (2.5-inch) SAS

  • 10K RPM — 300 GB, 600 GB, 900 GB, 1.2 TB (our deepest cluster), 1.8 TB and 2.4 TB
  • 15K RPM — 146 GB to 900 GB for transaction-heavy databases
  • 6Gb/s and 12Gb/s variants clearly labeled — match your backplane generation

PowerEdge LFF (3.5-inch) Nearline

1 TB to 16 TB 7.2K nearline SAS and SATA for R530/R540/R740XD/R750 bulk bays — backup targets, file servers, and video storage. All with tray options for G11 through G15 chassis (the caddy design changed at G14; we stock both).

Replacing drives in an EqualLogic, Compellent or PowerVault array instead? See our dedicated PowerVault, EqualLogic and Compellent parts pages. Request volume pricing on 10+ drives with matched firmware.

Featured PowerEdge SAS Drives Products

Browse all 11,327 PowerEdge SAS Drives SKUs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do Dell hard drives come with the tray or caddy?

Ours mostly do — listings marked "with Tray" include the hot-swap caddy already installed and keyed for your PowerEdge generation. Dell used one caddy design for G11-G13 (R610/R620/R720/R730 era) and a new design from G14 (R640/R740 onward). If you order a bare drive, we can add the correct caddy — tell us your server model.

Will any SAS drive work in a Dell PowerEdge?

Electrically yes — PERC controllers accept any standard SAS/SATA drive. Dell does not firmware-lock drives on PowerEdge servers (that is a myth carried over from some storage arrays). The practical requirements are the correct caddy and, for RAID members, matching capacity and preferably matching RPM/firmware.

12Gb/s drive in a 6Gb/s backplane — does it work?

Yes. SAS is backward compatible: a 12Gb/s drive negotiates down to 6Gb/s on an older backplane, and a 6Gb/s drive works on a 12Gb/s backplane at its native speed. You only leave performance on the table with SSDs; for 10K/15K spinning drives the interface is not the bottleneck.

What is the difference between nearline SAS and regular SAS?

Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) is a 7,200 RPM drive with an enterprise SAS interface — capacity-optimized (up to 16 TB+) with dual-port capability, but slower random I/O than 10K/15K SAS. Use NL-SAS for bulk storage and backups, 10K/15K SAS for databases and VMs, and SSDs where IOPS matter most.

Related Pages

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