I have a FAS3210A with each head owning a DS4243 shelf of 1 TB SATA drives. Current RAID group size is 16. There are only 18 disk populated in each shelf (6 empty bays). 2 disks are hot spares for each shelf. Here's my question. I have 6 disks to add to each shelf, which will max out the shelf with 24 drives. Do I expand the RAID group size or keep it the same. If I keep it at 16, then I'm only going to get to use 4 out of the 6 drives, b/c it will create new parity drives. If I expand the RAID group size, will this affect performance? How badly will performance be affected? Also, what is the maximum RAID group size for a 3210 with 1 TB SATA drives. We're currently running ONTAP 7.3.5P1 on this cluster, with the idea of upgrading to 8.1.3P2 in the near future.
Thanks in advance for any info!