I need advice going forward on our 3PAR 8400 4 node.
It has 4 cages in total (including the ones with the controller nodes).
We initially bought it with 48 3.84TB SSD drives and are running RAID5 7+1 (magazine availability). We subsequently expanded the system by 8 disks now total of 56 Disks and remained on RAID5 7+1.
This is now an unbalanced system.
We are going to expand the system again with another 8 disks and we will have 64 disks in total. This makes me consider my options.
I prefer to change the RAID layout to RAID6 for better resiliency (even though we never had any disk failures). I could go for RAID 6 14+2 without loosing any usable space compared to the current RAID level.
Would this be a good idea?
However, if and when we need to expand again the next balanced configuration is with 96 disks which is too big a jump for the money men
How big a deal is it to run the system unbalanced anyway?
What would you guys do?
Thank you