topic Re: ideal RG size for best performance in ONTAP Hardware

ideal RG size for best performance

VKALVEMULA — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:08:29 GMT

i would like to know what would be the best/ideal RG size in an aggregate for "the best" performance (for about 60-70 disks)

at the same time i don wanna waste my disks by building 5+2 or 7+2 RGs

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

radek_kubka — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:56:05 GMT

Hi Vijay,

That's a very interesting question - and a bit of dark art to answer this!

In general bigger RG means more capacity & more performance, as more spindles are actively serving data (or less parity drives in other words). The downside is, bigger RG will require more time to rebuild if a disk fails (however pre-emptive data copying from a "dodgy" disk via Disk Maintenance can help here).

I normally stick to NetApp Synergy tool suggested RG size, which also tries to make all RGs with the same aggregate as even as possible (which has an impact on performance)

For 60 SAS disks Synergy says RG=20 (perfectly balanced), for 70 SAS disks it suggests RG=18. You can increase this up to RG=28, but preferred range is 12-20.

Regards,
Radek

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

thomas_glodde — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:55:15 GMT

on netapp support site, there is a storage subsystem configuration faq which goes into details on what aggrs you should create. usualy sweet spot for sas drives is between 16 and 22 disks.

small sequential io expected, rather small rg´s due to smaller stripes to calc parity and write

large sequential io expected, rather big rg´s due to big stripes

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

radek_kubka — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:47:52 GMT

small sequential io expected, rather small rg´s due to smaller stripes to calc parity and write

I would challenge that - this is what NVRAM is for, isn't it?

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

vims — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:27:32 GMT

THis is what I've created for myself

Vic

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

dburkland — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:19:04 GMT

Is this tool available to the public? I have created an Excel spreadsheet that does this but it would be nice to have an official tool.

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

pascalduk — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 06:51:10 GMT

The maximum RAID group size for SATA is 20 and not 16.

https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1141781/html/GUID-AA1419CF-50AB-41FF-A73C-C401741C847C.html

RAID group sizes

RAID-DP

SATA/BSAS/FSAS/MSATA/ATA: 14

FC/SAS: 16

SSD: 23

SATA/BSAS/FSAS/MSATA/ATA: 20

FC/SAS: 28

SSD: 28

RAID4

SATA/BSAS/FSAS/MSATA/ATA: 7

FC/SAS/SSD: 8

SATA/BSAS/FSAS/MSATA/ATA: 7

FC/SAS/SSD: 14

RAID0

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

aborzenkov — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 06:53:11 GMT

Max SATA RG size depends on DOT version.

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

radek_kubka — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 10:45:00 GMT

Synergy is only available for NetApp partners.

But is doesn't do anything massively clever with regards to RG sizes - for a given number of disks it tries to do two things:

- make all RG's as even as possible

- fit RG size into the preferred range of 12-20

Re: ideal RG size for best performance

VKALVEMULA — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:28:40 GMT

thanks for the info guys.

for my SAS disks:

as of now my current RG size is 21+2 (so that i can get use of all spindles in one shelf. )

i am planning to add 6 additional disks to my pool ( as a growth )

so when i check my aggr i see my RG can accommodate 28 disks in RG0, so if i add 6 additional disks to it, it would look like 26 + 2 but leaving 1 disk aside 9 as a spare )

what would be the complexity if i rearrange my existing RG ( rg0 ) to rg0 -> 20+2 and rg1 -> 20+2

and keep adding all my future disks to RG1 so that i can make use of more spindles and balance the RG's

For SATA of 60 disks:

i will go with 18+2 's