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I just bought a HP ProLiant ML30 G9 4U. I was planning on putting in standard enterprise sata hard drives. Very low usage server. What I have found is that HP has made the drive storage area not fit standard sata drives. Apparently they want you to buy HP drives to fit in here. Is there any inexpensive drive adapters that will allow me to install my sata drives? Nothing fancy, I don't want to hot swap. I just want to install my drives.

You can most likely get drive caddies from eBay or Amazon. They shouldn't be too hard to find. In theory, you can just screw your drive into one of these caddies and slot the caddy into the front of the server. This one should work: http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-5-Drive-Tray- ... 1001449171

HOWEVER

I say "in theory" because HP have an extremely nasty habit of restricting the drives that their servers can use to HP branded drives. They make the storage controllers look for HP firmwares and refuse to work with anything else. This may or may not happen with the server you've got but it's very much caveat emptor.

Yeah, proprietary drive trays/caddies are a PITA. I deal with them (from multiple vendors) a lot at work.

When I speced out the parts for a desktop mid-tower build that was going to be used for offline analysis of drive failures and performance, I put a trayless backplane in it. That way at least I don't need to install ANOTHER caddy in addition to removing the original one; I just remove the caddy and slide the drive in. Laptop form factor HDDs and SSDs still require an adapter to fit the 3.5" backplane, but since the arrangement is typically short-term, I don't even bother screwing the drive to the adapter (the friction of the SATA/SAS connector is sufficient to hold the drive in place).

I use similar trayless backplanes in my home file server.

One thing I found out with the ProLiant ML350 G6 that I own is if you use the built in SAS/SATA backplane it can be very fussy with consumer level drives. The "HP" branded drives have a tweaked firmware with regards to temperature monitoring and some models of consumer drives report back as being overheated when attached to the backplane. It causes the fan to spin up to "jet engine" levels almost constantly.

Don't know if the G9 line has that same issue or not.

I found a bunch of good info on this issue here http://dascomputerconsultants.com/HPCom ... Drives.htm

In the end with my machine I just removed the backplane, bought a SAS expander that hooks up to the onboard P400i SAS controller and attached multiple SFF-8087 to sata cables to it which have worked perfectly. I don't hot swap drives with my server but I do have 14 drives in it right now.

I found some old rails from way back when you needed rails to install hard drives in the old computer cases. Was able to adapt them to allow the hard drives to fit. The HP noticed that it was not their hard drives and warned me that they would not blink the light (oh how terrible) but they set up as a raid and took my Windows 2012 r2 essential install.

There's an industry standard for how drives are supposed to activate the activity LED on a hot-swap bay. I'm a little surprised HP would do something different.