"You'd think a SSD drive would be faster to respond then a traditional spinning drive." This is a setting on the drive that is generally set at the factory, depending on what it is designed to be used for.  Enterprise-class drives have this value set at a much lower value than desktop/consumer-class drives, as they are typically used in a RAID environment.  Settings such as response time, timeout, cache, and recovery periods and features are all settings that are different between enterprise and consumer drives.  The controller has similar settings that are tweaked by OEM's (not just Dell) for performance and/or reliability reason.  OEM drive firmware is usually tweaked to compliment these settings, so the drive will act like the controller expects - like in this case, the controller is expecting the drive to respond in x amount of time, but the drive is set to take up to y amount of time (or not even respond at all until z amount of time passes). A 6-bay backplane is "probably" not using a SAS expander, as it probably has two cables, supporting 4 drives each, going to each of two connectors on the controller ... if you have just a single cable from the controller to the backplane and all the backplane slots are usable, then I would say it is using a SAS expander.  I could be wrong though ... it happens :)
Hi All,   Does anyone know if there is a setting where one can change the drive spin up timeout.  Seems like the available settings is limited compared to other SAS cards.   Regards,   Victor
PERC 6i drive spin up timeout?