I walked through my side office yesterday and noticed a flashy amber/red blinkenlight. Crap. This makes three dead SFF SAS drives in under a year. I guess I should not be too surprised, as this is HP G7 era hardware. 

I'm thinking of two alternatives. (not eager to spend more money on old SAS drives) I'm pretty sure my DL585g7 will take SATA drives, but I'll test with some on-hand spares before I buy.
- SATA SSD drives for decent speed (a single or a pair striped)
- SATA laptop HDs (cheap, high capacity, stripe/mirror a few for speed)

I know consumer SSD is not built for heavy server use. This is a low utilization test/home box, so they will never see serious workload.

What would you guys do in this situation?

at this rate you might as well replace all the drives. maybe start looking at the smart details of the other drives.

as for ssd usage if it is mostly reading the drive it should be fine for a long time but if it is reading and writing it would be short life.

I'm almost out of SAS drives... may just set them aside. (two 300 , 1 600 still running)

The worst workload these drives will see is hosting VMs on a test box or home server system. No daily SQL grind or constant thrashing. I was considering a 2 SSD stripe both for capacity and to distribute load. 

$50 for a used 300g HP 10k SFF - probably get one or two and rebuilld R5 or go R10
$16 for a new 146g HP 10k SFF - might as well put all 8 in an R10
$80 for a new 240g SSD (consumer, WD blue) - probably get one or two 
$55 for a new Seagate 1TB laptop drive - probably 2 or 4, but I'll need another tray

If I move this box to our colo, the noise, power draw and heat from the drives is a non-issue. If I take it home, well, I think I'll be better off selling it and getting a quieter box for that.