Yes, I admin'd 3PAR's for10 years and never really saw a higher rate of failure between the different disks. As far as the custom firmware, most of it revolves around the spare block allocations and when it fails blocks from what I understand. I run several 2.5" 900GB disks from a 3PAR with other "standard" Proliant drives and haven't noticed any issues with them (all 10k spinners). I did have to reformat them to work (the whole 512 vs 520 issue).