You can specify the raid group size per raid group in an aggregate. As long as the speed of disks in the different raids groups are the same you should not see a performance issue for the aggregate. You should have at least one hot spare of each drive type and configure Ontap to use the same size drive when selecting a hot spare. Ontap should be at the latest revision if possible.

Joel

On 02/02/2011 05:24 PM, Ray Van Dolson wrote:

Have an aggregate comprised of 300GB disks and have two new shelves with 450GB disks.

I ran across this[1] which describes some concerns when dealing with disks of mixed sizes.

It sounds like I can't specify that 450GB disks and 300GB disks be assigned to distinct raid groups (my raid size is 16), so if I add the 450GB disks to my aggregate, I'll likely only be able to use 300GB of them.

Therefore I should create a new aggregate for the 450GB disks.

Is my understanding of this correct?

Also, the raid size seems to default to 16 -- I'm used to keeping RAID-6 raid groups to 9 disks at most. Is 16 OK?

Thanks, Ray

[1] http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel7261/html/ontap/smg/provis...