MD3000i only accepts Dell certified hard disk???

You'll want to return the 15 drives, contact Dell sales and purchase 15 MD3000i drives.

Just like most SANs from other major vendors (SUN, HP, IBM, EMC, etc), the MD3000i only accepts a limited number of drives with a limited number of firmwares and when a non-supported drive is put in, the system will not touch it.

True that...

Only Dell certified drives, and make sure if you order from Dell the rep understands exactly what it is going into.    I recently found out the hard way you can actually buy non-dell certified drives from Dell, Dell took them back, but it delayed a project by weeks.

Other san manufacturers may be the same, but with Dell?  On a replacement or adds / changes.   You do not get to choose the drive type.  You get flavor of the day.  Drives me crazy in all honesty.

Dell's Poweredge SATA drives generally won't work in an MD3000i as the MD3000i requires the little interposer board, which PERCs don't (assuming all drives on the PERC are SATA; single ported). Poweredge SAS drives may work, but to be certain you'd want to be sure and order the MD3000-series-specific drives.

Ive seen some Power edge drives work in the a Md3000/3000i , but as listed below i wouldnt suggest it. From my knowledge the interposer's are there to make Sata drives SAS compatible to fit onto the backplane. 

The requirement for the Dell branded drives stems from the extensive testing they do to qualify the drives on the various platforms. It is always recommended to use Dell supported drives to make sure the system is running optimal.

To be fair, that is a very poor answer as to why we can't buy our own hard drives from anyone else than Dell. The cost difference is very high. I can buy a 1 TB drive from Dell for $319.99, or a 2 TB drive (that is on the supported hard drive matrix sheet) for $371 from CDW. Why should I not be able to use this drive?

Because most all san manufacturers only allow their drives to be used, just the way it is once you get to san.   I think you can use non-Dell-certed drives in an MD3000 but not an MD3000i.

D-Link also offers SAN solutions without "certified" drives. Honestly, reliability of hard drives is not often an issue past the first 30-90 days. That is when most failures occur.

For SAN solutions that offer support for non-certified (retail) drives, you can look at solutions from Synology or QNAP. However, these vendors do keep lists of certified drives as well. The units typically will accept other drives, but if you ever have any issues related to the drives, they won't support you unless you have drives that are listed on their supported-drive-list.

You can also build you own SAN using OpenFiler.

The difference is the support and reliability that you will experience in the long run, but you get to save some money on the drives.

I apologize for not liking what Dell is doing here, but it is odd to delete a post for not violating the terms of use and saying it did. I'm done with this anyways, so whomever gets to read this before it is deleted again.. Bye.