Yes. Then again, I have been moving more towards clusters rather than HA SAS hence why I look for lower power SATA SSDs rather than SAS at lower capacities.
I recently purchased these same drives new for as low as $22 from digitalmind2000. He could have went to 20, but, I did not have the right quantity. These drives do not need an HP to be used, and on my LSI controllers, no reformatting was needed either.
Here's my set up. I am using 10K 2.5" drives are mid-tier. I have Enterprise S3500 SSD's running tier 1, SAS2 10k 2.5" running as tier 2, and 7200 SAS2 running as Near-Line. I then have bulk 3.5" SATA storage running low-end SATA for DR/bulk copies of the tiers for recovery purposes. (I have 56 drives, with about 46TB of storage total)
I put production data on the SSD's, data that needs good performance, but, mostly read on the 10K, and I put daily backups, and my ISO collection on the Near-Line. I can max out 10Gbe of throughput on sequential reads and writes on all tiers. Random, and latency sensitive workloads, of course like the SSD best.
My workstation for example accesses Diablo III over iSCSI, and it is on the 10K drives. There's absolutely no difference between the 10K and SSD's for that app (bad example, but fun none the less) I do notice about 3-5 seconds slower load times if I use the NL-SAS.
Now, would I purchase the 480's instead, absolutely. If they had been available when I purchased the 300GB drives, I would have done that. The 480's provide a tad better performance for random I/O than the 300 GB ones. Not really noticeable, but, if the price was $14 as some where getting, I would have loved that deal.
HTH
