I have a Dell T710, coming with PERC 6/i RAID controller. The current raid has 2x500 GB hard drives (with the OS), and 6x1000 GB hard drives (in RAID-6, currently empty). I would like to take one 1000 GB disk physically out to keep as an immediate spare in case of a crash, and configure the remaining 5x1000 GB in a single VD RAID-6.

This is all nice and clean and works, until I realized that the display on the machine reports the lack of the 8th disk as an error. It's marked as error, but appears to be a warning, since the machine is fully functional.

My question is: what is the best way to keep one disk as a spare out of the array? should I disassemble the disk from the cradle and insert the empty cradle in the array ? Or should I just silence the error in the display in some way (how?). I know that what I am doing sounds pretty strange, but here is academia and having a spare disk available could take weeks. Better to have one ready in my drawer for any emergency.