SATA SSD in Dell Server

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.

The H200 can present at most 2 logical drives (virtual disks) so your plan for 3 RAID groups wont fly with the H200 controller alone. You could configure the SSD's in one RAID 10 group, and the 8 SAS HDD's in the other but that wont deliver isolation between the IO on the two data drives.

Which document are you referring to that states that the SAS drives must be in slots 0 and 1 for mixed SAS\SSD setups? The H200 user guide doesn't mention that restriction, the only restrictions that are mentioned are that all drives in a RAID group must be either all SSDs or HDDs and either all SAS or all SATA.