FOR MARK A. PERC COMPATIBILTY.

It would depend on which PERC you're using on the system currently.

For example the PE2650 if equiped with the onboard raid option is an Adaptec solution, but the PE2600 uses an LSI solution if it's the onboard option. The systems after the 6th gen are all LSI if I'm not mistaken.

Then there's the PCI card option... PERC3's and higher are LSI and PERC2 is Adaptec as far as I know.

In other words, unless you're using PCI cards and they're all from the same manufacturer (Dell is the OEM, LSI and Adaptec would be the manufacturers) there won't be a 'single card' that you could use as a spare.

Another factor is that the onboard/integrated raid controller option consists of the motherboard, a dimm and an enabler key (and depending on the server model maybe the riser too). So the 'spare part' would be a unique to that server model only and wouldn't just be 1 part.

If you dont have huge drives aka 80 gigs or smaller you can stab in a pci IDE card and ghost an image to the ide drive. That doesnt work for all but it works for several.