If theres no spares= option in mdadm.conf, then spare_disks gets set to UnSet, and --monitor sends a SparesMissing event because there are less than 65534 spare disks available. Attached patch defaults this to 0, which matches both the --detail --brief output, and the docs from ANNOUNCE-1.4.0. Bradley - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html