No problem Scott,
Just remember that if you've got 12 disks in total, that's 6 disks per controller. 2 hot spares, 2 parity (if you stick with the defaults and recommended layout).
I think there was a little miscommunication in some of the posts earlier. You have SATA disks, and the NetApp recommended RAID layout for that is 14 disks. You don't need to tweak this, the defaults will already be on. You also don't really need to make too much consideration to this at the moment either. When you add more disks, the RAID group will simply grow until you reach 14 disks, then it'll create a new RAID group for you. This is all behind the scenes and automated, so don't worry too much about that, just stick with the defaults.
If you think that only have 2 data disks per controller is a bit slim on the storage availability (giving you around 6-700g usable), you can tweak the overheads. You can drop down to 1 hot spare, or single parity if you want. Although this will potentially give you less protection, it will give you more immediate usable storage. Arguably if you have 4 hour parts replacement, then 1 hot spare and 1 parity is more than enough on a smaller system. As you grow, you can convert this later. So if you add more disks in 6 months, you could give yourself an extra hot spare, and then convert the aggregate into RAID-DP (2 parity) at that time.
I'm a big fan of RAID-DP, so I wouldn't drop that unless I was really desperate, but you could quite happily drop one of the hot spares. The only thing you lose there is the disk garage feature. This is quite a cool feature that checks a failed disk for soft errors, reformats it and re-labels the disk as a spare if it is recoverable. A very cool feature on a big system with lots of spindles and potential failures more often (purely by a greater chance), but on a smaller system this is less of a really useful feature. I'd personally go for 1 hot spare and keep the RAID-DP. This will give you 3 data disks on each controller. Nice and easy to grow into in the future aswell. The only thing here is that you'll need to add one of the spares on the command line as the filer view will force you to have 2 hot spares.
Not meaning to confuse you with too much info and too many options, but I want to make sure you're doing the right thing. Now is the time to make sure you get the configuration right, not in 6 months when it's already in production! Remember you can always add new storage and build on a good architecture. But changing the fundamentals down the road or shrinking storage can be quite tricky. NetApp have made the systems very easy to grow into, just make sure you're comfortable with the architecture from the start.
Give me a shout if you need any more pointers or you have any more questions. I work quite a lot with the smaller systems and I work closely with customers to get the most out of them, and it's always dependent on exactly what you want from the system and how you want the storage to be provisioned and layed out. The systems are nice and flexible like that!
Hopefully the above info is helpful to you though...
