As many of our customers already have hard drives, our servers ship without drives by default. If you would like hard drives included with your server purchase, please add them to your cart from this page. All listed hard drives are compatible with every server type. All hard drives purchased with a server will be fully tested, installed, and configured to your preference. In the checkout process you will have the opportunity to customize your order and include special hard drive configuration instructions.

Every server has a special drive known as the ‘Parity Disk’ that is dedicated to protecting your data – this drive must be equal in size or larger than your largest data disk, and it does not count towards your server’s storage capacity. The number in each server’s name corresponds to the number of drives that server can support (e.g. the Cleverbox 12 can support up to 12 total drives – 1 parity disk, and 11 data disks). You can also add an optional cache drive, which can help optimize data transfer speeds and provide better performance with certain software and plug-ins. We recommend using a cache drive if you plan to use your server for any of the following purposes:

• Downloading torrents or newsgroups directly to the server
• Running software or plug-ins that require frequent read/write access
• Frequently transferring 50+ GB of data to your server in a single transfer

If you aren’t sure if you need a cache drive, please contact us and describe how you plan to use your server. More information can also be found in our blog.