Hmmmm the old PS60x0 comes with 16x3.5". The PS61x0 and later comes as 24x 3.5" 12x 3.5" or 24x 2.5" So IIRC there is no modell with 16 disks. Dell "removed" the RAID5 Option within one of the latest FW Version from the GUI, if a  customer have 1TB disks or greater because the chance of a double disk failure increases when doing long ongoing raid rebuild with large disks.   If you would like to force the use of a RAID5 + Single Hotspare you have to create the raid leveln from the command line. We use RAID50 for the older 16 disk modell which means: Usable Disks = Total Disks - 4 (2 Parity + 2 Hotspares) Regards, Joerg
I will preface this by saying I am new to Equallogic SANs... I have a PS6100 with 16 2TB drives.  When doing the initial configuration on the array it is leaving 4 of the disks as "spare" no matter which RAID level I choose.  The option to right click on the drive and choose "Add disk to RAID" is grayed out. Having 4 drives/8TB of "spare" storage seems way too excessive.  I would only want 1 or 2 hot spares.  I don't know if there is a problem preventing the array from allowing them to be "online" or if there is a setting to specify the number of spares.  If there is a setting, I can't find it anywhere. Please advise if this is normal behavior or if there is anything I can do to get some of this extra space added to my array. Thank you!
Too Many Spare Drives When Creating Array