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Aggregate expansion workflow

Expanding an aggregate involves identifying the aggregate to expand, determining how much new storage is needed, installing new disks, assigning disk ownership, and creating a new RAID group if needed.

Note
Root aggregates can not be expanded, only data aggregates.

Aggregate expansion workflow

  • Adding drives to a node or shelf
    You add drives to a node or shelf to increase the number of hot spares or to add space to an aggregate.
  • Manually assigning disk ownership
    Disks must be owned by a node before they can be used in an aggregate. If your cluster is not configured to use automatic disk ownership assignment, you must assign ownership manually. You cannot reassign ownership of a disk that is in use in an aggregate.
  • Fast zeroing of drives
    Beginning in ONTAP 9.4, you can automatically and quickly zeros drives (both SSDs and HDDs) before provisioning without experiencing long wait times.
  • Expanding aggregates
    You can add disks to an aggregate so that it can provide more storage to its associated volumes. The procedure for adding partitioned disks to an aggregate is similar to the procedure for adding unpartitioned disks.