How many drives can fail in a RAID-DP netapp filer aggregate

To answer correctly i need to know :
How many disks you had/have ?
What RAID level are you using ? RAID5/RAID50/RAID6/RAID60/RAID10 ?
Did you have hotspares ?

For example in a RAID6 with 12 disks (that would do a single RAID0 of three RAID6 of 4disks each) you could lose maximum six of the 12 total disks (two in each set if you are lucky) and it could also fail with only 3 bad disks (3 in the same set) if you are very unlucky.

you may have a look at those links :
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/raid-50-offers-a-balance-of-performance-storage-capacity-and-data-integrity/
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/understand-when-raid-60-is-overkill/

Did a hot spare kick in and the raid rebuild to that?
A triple disk failure in any single raid group is terminal. You would then need to be spending big bucks to get your data recovered or of course going back to that very reliable backup that you keep :D

@Stampel
Please read the question.

This is a NETAPP RAID DP implementation so what you say is not relevant.  There is no " RAID5/RAID50/RAID6/RAID60/RAID10 ?"

RAID-DP uses RAID6 and only prevents from the loss of 2 disks.
A 3rd failed drive would have collapsed the volume

RAID DP Is a proprietary implementation and not a standard raid 6 implementation.  I already stated that it is two disks.

If you wish to read the technical explinations, see here

http://community.netapp.com/t5/Tech-OnTap-Articles/Back-to-Basics-RAID-DP/ta-p/86123

Read again you did not state its RAID6, i did :)

No i did not say it was raid six as it is not. It is RAID DP, as stated by the questioner.  I did state that a triple disk failure would be terminal.

The objective here is not to argue about specifications it is to give the questioner clear concise accurate information based on reading his/her question.  My first reply did so.

You are wrong, RAID DP uses RAID6 check the documentation !
http://www.netapp.com/us/products/platform-os/raid-dp.aspx

As stated already it is RAID DP, which is a special form or RAID 6. Raid 6 uses 2 parity blocks, so 2 disks can fail. But the parity of RAID 6 isn't dedicated to certain disks, rather it is distributed on all of the. With RAID DP, the parity blocks are on two disks dedicated for parity. For that reason you still had 2 parity disks running OK when you had the issue, the 2 disks that failed happened to be disks with data, and not those dedicated to parity.

But again as has been mentioned already, if a 3rd disk had failed, you'd have lost the data.

Typo rindi "As stated already it is RAID DP, which is a special form or RAID 6"

should have said "As stated already it is RAID DP, which is a special form OF RAID 6"

Of course, I didn't notice... I tend have many typo's.

Really? I never make Mistikes when i type ;)

technically you COULD have had data loss with even a single HDD failure, but the odds are quite small.   HDD parity protection data loss scenarios are based on the premise that 100% of the blocks on surviving drives are still readable and the parity is consistent and current.

To make it easy, let's say you just have 2 disks in a RAID1 (mirrored) config.    Block #3 just failed in disk A,  so it is unreadable.  Disk B just died.    You have partial data loss on disk A.  The data on Block#3 is unavailable.

See?  Even RAID DP, or RAID6, and RAIDZ2 levels dont protect against data loss if you have bad blocks at the wrong places when disks survive.

Thats A great answer     I couldnt tell what raid group they had come from.      Sysconfig -r. Just said broken 2 disks