Peter, The drives that are dell certified are enterprise drives that have a different firmware loaded on them to work with the MD series.  So if you are to use a 3rd party drive in the MD it will spin up & look for the Firmware to ensure that it is the correct type of drive if it doesn’t find it then the drive is powered back off.  Sometimes u can get lucky and get one to work but once again if the drives are not on the supported list then the drive will not work in the MD. 
Hello, I have a SQL database running on Dell PowerEdge R910. I use PCIe SSD drive to host the database files. I'm running out of space and considered several options including 3.2TB OCZ Z Drive R4 and 2.4TB Fusion-io ioDrive2 duo, but none of will work with this server (doesn't accept full length cards and doesn't supply more than 25W to a slot). Currently I'm thinking about buying Dell PowerVault MD1220 and filling it with SATA or SAS SSDs and connecting to something like H810 (which, I understand, uses the latest LSI 2208 chip like LSI MegaRAID SAS 9285-8e). Has anyone used MD1220 with SSDs other than those sold and supported by Dell? What is your experience with reliability and performance? Cheers, Peter
Has anyone tried SSDs in MD1220?