topic Re: SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250 in ONTAP Discussions

SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250

PeterMekes — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:23:31 GMT

Hi,

Is the AFF-A250 an capacity-optimized system and can I safely change the "raid.min_spare_count" to 0 ?

Customer is getting every week a SPARES_LOW warning.

Re: SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250

CHRISMAKI — Fri, 28 May 2021 18:38:49 GMT

I believe setting that value to 0 would eliminate the SPARES_LOW warning, but the real question here should be "should I have zero hot spares available?", to which my answer would be no...Now if you have cold spares on site, that would make me less nervous, but I'd much rather see a hot spare be available.

EDIT: Just tried this and go the following:

option raid.min_spare_count: Cannot be set to 0 if there are more than 16 drives or any RAID4 groups configured.

Re: SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250

PeterMekes — Fri, 28 May 2021 21:37:31 GMT

Hi Chrismaki,

The system has 8 disk and partioned with root-data-data. They are provisioned into aggregates such that each controller uses 7 data partitions for filesystem data, and one data partition remains as a spare. (Recommended during installation)

So there are no spare disk only a spare partition per controller.

Re: SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250

CHRISMAKI — Fri, 28 May 2021 23:24:18 GMT

Hi PeterMekes,

I just confirmed in Fusion that the partitioning you described is as expected from ADP R-D-D. Because of this, you should be able to adjust MIN_SPARES to 0, I didn't have access to an 8 drive system, so I was unable. As you can see in the error message from my previous reply was that setting it to 0 on systems with more than 16 drives isn't supported, but you are well under that threshold.

Re: SPARES_LOW on AFF-A250

PeterMekes — Sat, 29 May 2021 14:27:34 GMT

Hi Chrismaki,

Thanks, I shall adjust the setting to 0.