All About Caddies. What to Expect When You Buy a Server From TechMikeNY
A question we often get from customers, "how many caddies will my server come with?"
A quick background: server caddies – sometimes called server trays – are the small sleds that hold the hard drive, allowing it to slide into the server and attach to the backplane. The advantage of caddy-based bays is they allow the hard drives to be hot-swappable. Hot-swappable means that drives can be removed, added, or swapped without shutting down the server. All servers that TechMikeNY sells have hot-swap hard drive caddy tray bays.
When buying a server through TechMikeNY, it's vital to check the specs, specifically the Hard Drive and Drive Bays field.
The possible scenarios are:
- All server bays are populated with hard drives and caddies, e.g., Hard Drives: 24 x Caddies. In other words, all 24 server caddies with hard drives are included.
- Caddies are ONLY included for the hard drives that come with the server, e.g., Hard Drives: 8x 600GB 10K SAS 2.5" 6G - Total Storage of 4.8TB. Then the caddies for those eight drives are only included, and if the server has additional bays, those will be left blank – no drives or caddies (see the above screengrab for an example, the server is configured with two hard drives, but has eight bays – those six free bays would be empty).
- No caddies would be included in the order, e.g., Hard Drives: No HDDs and No Caddies/Sleds.
- Lastly, the server comes with no hard drives, but all bays come with caddies, e.g., Hard Drives: 8x Caddies - Total Storage of 0GB.
In instances where there are no drives or caddies in the bays, we always include fillers in the empty bays before shipping out your server.
The good news: TechMikeNY has an enormous inventory of spare Dell & HP server caddies for sale. If you intend to utilize the unused bays on the server, either in the long or short term, you can buy hard drive caddy trays. There is no performance issue if an empty caddy is loaded into a server.