Perc 5/i and 3TB drives

It does not look like it does...

From HDD Support for 2.5TB, 3TB Drives and Beyond (Article is recent - Mar 31 2011, 5:21 PM EDT):

IMPORTANT NOTE! Only the Dell H700 and H800 currently support the 3TB drives (H200 will add support later this year) - NO earlier controllers, such as the PERC4/5/6, SAS5/6 (or ANY other Dell controller not mentioned) have this support and in some cases, even though you may be able to see the drive, this has NOT been tested or validated, so possible data loss could be experienced. ONLY use the Dell H700 and H800 with the proper firmware to ensure a tested and validated >2TB solution!

It has not yet for PERC 5 controllers, according to previous question Perc 5/i and 3TB drives?

I also went through the Driver/Firmware upgrades for the PERC controllers, and there is no mention of >2TB Hard drives.

Also, there's nothing to say that Dell won't release firmware to do such--but I think that is unlikely as well. If you do need that about going to the H700 or H800 controllers?

In my experience, it's like putting more than 4 GB or RAM into a 32 bit OS, in that the additional space is simply not usable.

There is one major difference though, in that if you have support through Dell, and you use unsupported hardware (like a 3 TB drive), you will be invalidating your support, and may very well be told "no" if you need to call in about a an issue related to the PERC card, storage array or drives (and most anything can be stretched into being "related" to those components, if they want to badly enough).

It would really be best to just replace the 3TB drives with 2TB ones. Yeah, the price is about the same, but if you're not going to be able to use the additional TB of disk space, the only functional difference is that one's supported, and one is unsupported and "has NOT been tested or validated, so possible data loss could be experienced." The better choice is clearly the supported one that's otherwise functionally identical to the unsupported one.