I have an old HP Proliant DL385. Can I use the drives (36.4 GB – 10k, ULTRA320 SCSI) on a custom build, or is the interface a proprietary HP specific one? What support do I need from the motherboard? Thanks.
edit: corrected title as per t1nt1n
Reuse HP Proliant SCSI drives in a custom build
hphp-proliantsatascsi
Best Answer
The original HP ProLiant DL385 was available in legacy U320 SCSI and SAS models. The chassis design was lifted from the ProLiant DL380 G4 systems.
The disks you're speaking of will work in a hot-plug SCSI environment. They are 80-pin SCA connectors (see the top drive in the photo below), which provide SCSI and power over a single interface, instead of a separate 68-pin SCSI port and separate 4-pin MOLEX for power.
Nothing unique to HP about them, except that it's old technology. The industry made a shift away from parallel SCSI in 2004/2005, so your real limitations are that drives aren't available in anything greater than 300GB, and overall throughput is low, compared to SAS/SATA.
If you wish to use the drives somewhere else, it's less about the motherboard or SCSI card, and more about the drive bay. These SCA drives are meant to be installed in special hot-swap drive bays with SCA backplanes, usually with a drive sled/carrier. They're not engineered for use in a typical computer chassis. The 68-pin SCSI connector/cable would interface with the drive cage, not the individual disks.
So the chances that the drives would be usable in a custom build are very slim, unless the chassis is design specifically for this type of disk.