The cheapest way to a large media library with real drive bays. This build optimises for cost per terabyte of shelf space rather than for compute, and the DL380 Gen9 is where the used market's price floor for a twelve-bay machine sits. This page prices the whole parts list live: a ProLiant DL380 Gen9 in its 12 x 3.5in LFF configuration, 12 drives and 12 carriers, and 32 GB of ECC memory.
Prices updated
Both halves of this are live prices, so the total is a real figure rather than an estimate — but it still excludes processors (which arrive fitted and which we do not price), rails and cables.
HPE sold an enormous number of these and they came off lease in an enormous number, which is the entire argument: it is the cheapest twelve-bay chassis of its class on the second-hand market. HPE documents the DL380 Gen9 in a 12 LFF configuration with an optional rear cage, and for a media library that front density is the whole specification that matters.
Full bay configurations, chassis pricing, noise and management-licensing detail for this machine are on the ProLiant DL380 Gen9 buyer's guide, and what fits each backplane is on its drive compatibility page.
Every table below is live. Where a part class has nothing in stock the table says so rather than quietly disappearing, because a parts list with a silent gap is worse than one with an admitted one.
We hold 3 verified Amazon listings for this machine. Read the configuration in the title rather than the model number — two machines with the same model can differ several-fold in price on processors, memory and how many carriers are included.
| HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 12B LFF 2X E5-2609 V3 Six Core 1.9Ghz 32GB H240ar (Renewe… | $425.89 | Refurb | Buy |
| HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 12B LFF 2X E5-2630 V3 Eight Core 2.4Ghz 96GB 12x 300GB 15… | $775 | Refurb | Buy |
| HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 24B SFF, 2X Intel Xeon E5-2609 v3 1.9Ghz (12-cores Total)… | $795 | Refurb | Buy |
6 in-stock listings · 12 needed for this build · ranked by live cost per tb, refreshed every few hours
| Drive | Capacity | Interface | Recording | Condition | $/TB | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G 695842-001 | 4TB | SAS-6G | CMR | NEW | $14.00 | $56 | Buy |
| HP ST31000640SS 1TB SAS ST31000640SS | 1TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $14.99 | $15 | Buy |
| HGST HUS724030ALS640 3TB SAS 6G HUS724030ALS640 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $15.13 | $45 | Buy |
| Seagate 3TB Enterprise Capacity SAS 6G ST3000NM0023 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $17.98 | $54 | Buy |
| HGST HUS726040ALS210 4TB SAS 12G HUS726040ALS210 | 4TB | SAS-12G | CMR | REFURB | $18.13 | $73 | Buy |
| Dell NWCCG 6TB SAS 6G NL Renewed NWCCG | 6TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $18.33 | $110 | Buy |
Conventional recording only. A shingled drive in a parity array turns a rebuild that should take hours into one that takes days, and the array is at its most vulnerable for the whole of that window — see our CMR drive list. For condition, recertified enterprise drives are the normal supply for a build like this; our recertified guide covers what the grades mean.
3 in-stock listings · 12 needed · ranked per caddy, not per pack · ranked by price per unit, not pack price · refreshed every few hours
| Listing | Pack | Pack price | Per caddy | Condition | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIHG 2PCS 3.5" LFF SAS SATA Drive Tray Caddy 774026-001 for HP ProLiant ML350 … | 2× | $14.99 | $7.50 | USED | Buy |
| AIHG 2PCS 3.5" LFF SAS SATA Drive Tray Caddy 774026-001 for HP ProLiant ML350 … | 2× | $18.99 | $9.49 | NEW | Buy |
| 3.5" inch LFF SAS SATA HDD Tray Caddy Compatible for HP 651314-001 651320-001 … | 2× | $25.99 | $13.00 | NEW | Buy |
At $7.50 per carrier, filling 12 bays costs about $90 — a line most people leave out of the budget entirely, and one of the two reasons a cheap chassis turns out not to be cheap. Compatibility, part-number provenance and what to check on arrival are on the HPE Gen8/Gen9 3.5" LFF page.
A media library is a sequential-read workload and it is not memory-hungry. 32 GB is comfortable for the operating system, the media server application and its metadata, with room for a container or two. Buying 128 GB for a machine whose job is streaming files is money that would be better spent on another drive.
The DL380 Gen9 is a DDR4 platform, but its memory profile is not the Gen10's: Gen9 runs E5-2600 v3/v4 at 2133 and 2400 MT/s where the Gen10 runs Xeon Scalable at 2666. We hold a verified compatibility profile for the Gen10 and not for the Gen9, and pointing this page at the Gen10 data would assert support HPE does not document for this machine. So this page shows no memory picks. Browse our server memory catalogue and match against HPE's own QuickSpecs for your specific configuration. Browse the server memory catalogue.
Rails are the part nobody remembers until the machine is on the floor and the rack is on the wall. We do not track rail kits and we are not going to quote a part number for one, because rail kits are chassis-generation and rack-depth specific and a wrong kit is a bulky, expensive return. Ask the seller whether rails are included — many listings include them and many do not, and it is a question worth one line before purchase.
We also do not price processors. Used servers overwhelmingly arrive with them fitted, so the chassis figure above is for a configured machine; read the listing to see which are in it. If you intend to upgrade later, price that separately, because we have no data to offer you there and inventing a figure would be worse than admitting the gap.
Transcoding first, because it is the thing that disappoints people. Hardware-accelerated transcoding on Intel platforms comes from Quick Sync, which is a feature of Intel's integrated graphics. The Xeon E5-2600 v3 and v4 processors these machines ship with are server parts without integrated graphics, so Quick Sync is not available to you. Neither are the Xeon Scalable chips in the Gen10. This is a property of the platform, not a configuration you have got wrong.
In practice that means one of three things. Your clients direct-play the files, in which case none of this matters and a media server is essentially a file server. Or you transcode in software on the CPU, which these machines have a great many cores for. Or you add a discrete GPU in a PCIe slot and transcode on that, which works and costs extra and needs a card that fits the chassis and its power budget. We do not publish transcoding performance figures for any of these, because that depends on your files, your clients and your settings, and anybody quoting you a stream count for “a DL380 Gen9” is quoting a machine rather than yours.
The second honesty is noise, and it matters more for this build than any other on this site, because a media server tends to live near the people consuming the media. This is rack hardware designed for a room with its own cooling. Community reports consistently describe ProLiant fans as acceptable in a rack and intrusive in a room, and the recurring trigger is hardware the management controller does not recognise raising the fan floor. We publish no decibel figure because we have not measured one.
The practical consequence: decide where this machine lives before you buy it. A garage, a basement or a cupboard with a door is fine. Beside a television is not, and no amount of shopping fixes that after the fact. If the machine must live in a room you occupy, our noise page sets out the landscape honestly and the NAS device category is the genuinely quiet alternative.
On processor graphics: Intel publishes per-processor specifications on its product pages — see the Xeon E5-2680 v4 specification page as a representative example of the family these machines ship with. We have not been able to fetch that page directly from our tooling, so we state the general platform position rather than quoting it, and link it for you to check.
Price your own variant in the build calculator · Where to buy the chassis · What to check when it arrives · The other build guides · Add 10GbE to this build
We publish it as two numbers rather than one, because only part of it is a live price. The parts we track - drives, carriers, memory - currently sum to $762. The chassis is a live Amazon listing at $425.89. That puts a realistic total at $1,188. Collapsing an estimate band into a single figure would invent precision we do not have.
No, and that is a deliberate gap. We do not track CPU prices, so quoting one would mean making a number up. Used servers overwhelmingly arrive with processors already fitted, which is why the chassis figure above is for a configured machine rather than a bare board - read the listing to see which processors are in it. If you intend to upgrade them later, price that separately.
This build fills 12 of the chassis's bays, so the parts list prices 12 drives and 12 carriers. Empty bays keep their blanks rather than sitting open, because the cooling design assumes the airflow path stays closed. If you plan to fill fewer bays now and grow later, scale both numbers together - and buy carriers in the multi-pack size that matches the final count, because per-unit price falls sharply with pack size.
Not necessarily. This build does not depend on the filesystem seeing raw disks, so whatever controller arrived in the machine is likely fine. If you later decide to run ZFS on it, that changes - see our IT mode guide for which cards present drives directly and which do not.
Almost certainly, and most people building this should. Recertified enterprise drives are the normal supply for a build like this - the same drives at a fraction of the price, typically rated for a higher duty cycle than the consumer drives they undercut. What you trade is warranty length and the powered-on hours you inherit. The drive table above shows condition alongside price so the comparison stays honest rather than floating used drives to the top as though they were equivalent.
No. We price hardware and link the platforms' own documentation for installation, because their docs are maintained and ours would not be. What this page is for is the shopping list and the arithmetic - which parts, how many, what they cost today, and where the number is an estimate rather than a quote.