topic Re: Determining Disks Per Aggregate in ONTAP Hardware

Determining Disks Per Aggregate

CLOUDMINER — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:07:49 GMT

What are some good guidelines for determining how many disks should be in each aggregate?

Re: Determining Disks Per Aggregate

ekashpureff — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 21:23:01 GMT

CloudMiner -

That's not a short answer subject.

Minimum for RAID-DP is 5 disks, for RAID4 it's 3.

That wouldn't give you very good disk utilization.

Max disk #s depend on the controller platform.

Default RAID group sizes for DP are 14 and 16 for SATA and SAS/FC disks.

In general you want to build your aggrs with equal sized RAID groups and not stray too far from the default RAID group sizes...

I hope this response has been helpful to you.

At your service,

Eugene E. Kashpureff, Sr.
Independent NetApp Consultant http://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekashpureff
Senior NetApp Instructor, FastLane US http://www.fastlaneus.com/
(P.S. I appreciate 'kudos' on any helpful posts.)

Re: Determining Disks Per Aggregate

CLOUDMINER — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:18:22 GMT

Ok thanks. So there has got to be some process of balancing the space capacity required on a given aggregate with the performance capacity required, factoring in the IOPs available from each disk and the space provided by them. I'm trying to get a high level view of how someone would work through this process and come up with a number? Any other factors to consider?

Thanks!