topic Re: combine or move disks from a raid group in ONTAP Hardware

combine or move disks from a raid group

chris_lawless — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:36:56 GMT

Hello,

We created a raidgroup size for an aggr of 5 disks instead of leaving it the default 16. We now have 2 raid groups, rg0 - 5 disks, rg1 - 4 disks. I know we can expand the raid group size, however is there a way to eliminate rg1 and move, replace, or recover its disks with out blowing the whole aggr away?

FAS3270 - ontap 7.3.6

thanks!

--Clawless

Re: combine or move disks from a raid group

billshaffer — Thu, 01 May 2014 21:35:21 GMT

No, once the drives are part of an aggregate, they can't be taken out (with the exception of failing them, of course - but that won't accomplish what you want). I have wanted to do similar things many times - it'd be nice if you could balance drives out like you can with Oracle ASM disks...

Out of curiousity, why did you choose a RG size of 5?

Bill

Re: combine or move disks from a raid group

chris_lawless — Thu, 01 May 2014 22:06:49 GMT

Thanks Bill - thats what I was afraid of.

It ended up 5 by accident / lack of attention to detail I think - this filer is at our DR site and it’s also an office, our support guy there has been learning the NAS as a backup, we were moving all of his share data to the NAS from a file server and I told him to create an aggr with 5 disks, which he did and has done so before, the issue just came up when we needed more space, I went to add another disk and noticed the raid group issue. I guess he changed the raid group to 5 thinking it was the number of disks, and he apparently added three disks on his last expansion. I went back and checked all the other he has done and they are correct – not paying attention I guess.

Yes a way to reallocate disks / RGs or shrink aggrs would be nice. I have several times needed to shrink / recover disks from an aggr after a project is over but there is just a little bit of data remaining, so I have a catch-all aggr that I mirror the last bits to until they can be deleted so I can blow away the original aggr. Not hard just time consuming - easy to give, hard to take back.

Re: combine or move disks from a raid group

JGPSHNTAP — Fri, 02 May 2014 12:44:53 GMT

If this is a DR copy of your data, and you have extra disks, create a new aggr and snapmirror the data over

Re: combine or move disks from a raid group

chris_lawless — Mon, 05 May 2014 14:09:12 GMT

Good plan! We are setting that up now.