## Choosing between Express and Custom configuration modes

Express configuration provides a quick and easy path for you to automatically configure your ServeRAID controller. This choice creates the most efficient ServeRAID configuration based on the number and capacity of the ready drives available in your system. If four or more ready drives of the same capacity are available, this choice also will define a hot-spare drive.

Express mode configuration:

- Groups up to 8 or 16 ready drives of the same capacity into one disk array, depending on the stripe-unit size.
- Defines one logical drive for each array.
- Defines the maximum size possible of the logical drive, based on the amount of free space available.
- Assigns the highest RAID level possible (but not RAID level-5 Enhanced), based on the number of physical drives available.
- Define a hot-spare drive, if there are four or more hard disk drives of the same capacity.

Note: If you click Express, you will have the opportunity to review and approve the configuration before the ServeRAID Manager applies the configuration. If you need to modify the configuration, you can do so from the review panel.

You can use Custom configuration to manually configure your ServeRAID subsystem. Using this path, you can:

- Select the physical drives that you want to include in each array.
- Select the physical drives that you want to use as Hot spares.
- Define the number, size, and RAID level of the logical drives for each array.
- Review the configuration summary.

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