NetApp E2800: How recreate/reconfigure RAID-6?

[areti]

Hello!

I completed the initial setup wizard on a new NetApp E2812 (HDD 4 Tb * 12).

The wizard suggested by default to automatically configure the disk space optimally.

I agreed. As a result, RAID-6 was created from all 12 disks without a Hot Spare disk.

Now I think it might be more correct to manually create a RAID-6 from 11 disks + 1 disk in hot spare?

What are your recommendations? And how to reconfigure the RAID array now? There is no data on the disks yet, storage is just running.

[NetApp_AU]

Hello areti,

Unfortunately, you cannot remove drives from an existing RAID6 volume group. Because you have no data on the array, you can delete the current volume group, and then recreate it with the desired number of drives and assign the remaining drives as hot spares.

Helpful links:
How to delete a Volume Group

How to create a Volume Group

How to assign hot spares

[aborzenkov · Accepted solution]

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@areti wrote:

RAID-6 was created from all 12 disks without a Hot Spare disk.

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Is it Volume Group or Dynamic Disk Pool? DDP reserves at least on disk size as spare to reconstruct after disk failure and with 12 disks you can reserve space up to 2 x disk size.