HP D3700 JBOD: What It Takes and What It Costs

1 in-stock listing tracked · prices updated 2026-09-13

Specifications

Every row below carries its own source and provenance tier. VENDOR FACT means HP's own documentation states it, with the document linked; SELLER CLAIM means the figure comes from the listing text rather than a vendor document we could confirm; a blank row says plainly that neither sourced it - never a guess dressed as a specification.

What it connects to

A disk shelf has no USB port and no network interface - it connects to a host over SAS, through a host bus adapter with an external port. An internal-only HBA (the kind that ships in most used servers) has nothing to plug this into. See our HBA pages for cards with external ports and IT mode for why you want the card presenting raw disks rather than a RAID volume. The cable itself depends on the connector generation on both ends - the SAS cable guide covers every external SAS connector family in use and which HBA ports match which shelf ports.

What fits

This shelf takes 2.5" SAS drives natively. We do not assert SATA compatibility or an interposer requirement without a vendor statement - see the FAQ below for exactly what we could and could not confirm on that point for this model. Recording technology is verified per drive the same way it is everywhere else on this site: unknown recording tech is excluded from anything we call CMR-safe, and shingled (SMR) drives are never recommended for an array that rebuilds.

Where a 25-bay HP D3700 actually fits

This class of hardware reaches the used market because a business retired the servers that were plugged into it, not because the shelf itself failed - the compute moved on, the drives were often pulled and sold separately, and the enclosure is the part nobody wants to keep in a rack that no longer needs the bays. That is also the practical case for buying one: adding a 25-bay shelf to a server or workstation you already own is usually cheaper than buying a bigger chassis outright, because the host keeps doing the compute and networking work it already does and the shelf only adds slots and a backplane behind an HBA. Run the two paths - a bigger single box versus this host plus a D3700 - through the build calculator before committing to either.

25 bays maps cleanly onto a RAIDZ2 or RAID 6-style array with room left for a hot spare, which is why shelves in this class show up regularly in the TrueNAS and Proxmox builds covered in our build guides - losing two drives to parity leaves 23 bays of usable capacity rather than 25, the same RAID-overhead arithmetic the fill calculator runs for a bare NAS chassis. A shelf bought bare is exactly the kind of secondary-market hardware worth checking the moment it arrives rather than after it is racked and loaded - our verify-on-arrival checklist, written for used servers, applies the same way to a shelf: confirm the bay count, the I/O module version stamped on the module itself against what the listing claimed, and that every drive the seller says is included actually spins up and reports its full capacity before you consider the purchase settled.

The complete build

Three tiers, each pricing the shelf plus one drive per bay at that tier's point on the market. Trays are not included in any total below - we hold no verified listing for a D3700-specific drive tray, so the figure is a floor, not a finished number. Budget for trays separately before you buy.

The lowest-outlay answer to a different question - what does it cost to own one of these at all, not filled: the shelf alone, cheapest listing, is $518.13.

What to check before you buy

We hold no vendor confirmation of this shelf's I/O module generation. Ask the seller which module version is fitted before buying a second unit to stack with one you already own.

Frequently asked questions