About low spare warnings

By default, Data ONTAP issues warnings to the console and logs if you have fewer than one hot spare disk for each disk in your storage system. You can change the threshold value for these warning messages by using the raid.min_spare_count option.

To make sure that you always have two hot spares for every disk (a best practice), you can set the raid.min_spare_count option to 2.

Setting the raid.min_spare_count option to 0 disables low spare warnings. You might want to do this if you do not have enough disks to provide hot spares (for example if your storage system does not support external disk shelves). You can disable the warnings only if the following requirements are met:

Your system has 16 or fewer disks.
You have no RAID groups that use RAID4.
Note: You cannot create aggregates that use RAID4 protection while the raid.min_spare_count option is set to 0. If either of these requirements is no longer met after this option has been set to 0, the option is automatically set back to 1.

Parent topic: How Data ONTAP works with hot spares

Related concepts

Hot spare best practices

What disks can be used as hot spares

What a matching spare is

What an appropriate hot spare is

About degraded mode