You can buy supported drives from third-parties: www.xbyte.com/Items.aspx They will not replace them under warranty, but they will be supported - as in, Dell will help resolve any issues that may arise.  If the drives do not have the right firmware (third-party drives), Dell can't guarantee they will work with the controller ... issues such as performance degradation, random offline drives, timeouts, data corruption can occur when using non-certified (unsupported) drives (a result of tunable/configurable settings on both the drives and the controllers), which is the whole reason Dell has "supported" drives. The drive shortage is hurting everyone right now.  We have delayed a project a considerable amount of time because of it.
I have the best Gold plated super warranty possible on my Dell r510s. I want to buy 20ish 2TB drives and have been trying and checking availability with my sales rep for about 3 months now. I understand there was flooding in Thailand. I can't buy the drives (from Dell.) He has suggested over the phone that the best thing I can do is get them from a 3rd party. So I'm not taking any shortcuts, I'm buying seagate constellation drives the same as Dell does, not some shoddy consumer model. Now when I call support for help on a raid controller they tell me they have to stop working because I have 3rd party drives. Luckily I only have 2 so far because newegg will only sell one per transaction. So here is the infinite loop. Dell can't sell the drives, Dell won't support 3rd party drives. My business was on the INC500 list last year, obviously growing. We have a large demand for new storage to support our users and revenue. I called a cousin who is pretty high up at Dell and he suggests starting here before I flame dell on slashdot. The support policy has to change if Dell can't produce the supply. If I am forced to buy 3rd party drives to help my business grow I have two choices, stick with Dell and crippled support or find another company, (servers, kbox, desktops, everything.) I understand trying to make a high margin on consumables, but this is just ridiculous. Dell makes a massive amount of money on warranties from everyone. If we contunue to by dell we may need to stop buying the warranty on systems and buy cold spares instead. If our warranties are devalued by this conundrum, we will not renew them or continue to purchase them. I am fishing for a response from someone with the authority to make a policy decision here. Hard drive manufacturers chose to follow the financial incentives offered by the government of Thailand. They chose to move their factories to supply a global market without thinking they might need redundant locations for products which need to be redundant. Dell has the leverage to influence these decisions. Something needs to change. Next stop is slashdot, spiceworks, kbox forums, everywhere I can post. My company has waited three months with no results and waited a dangerous amount of time.  
Infinite loop - Dell will not sell 2tb drives to me, support will not support 
3rd party drives with best dell warranty available. Next message goes to 
Slashdot.