An information handling system and method provide for receiving a request to remove a selected physical disk from a disk group realizing a virtual disk in a redundant array data storage subsystem, determining whether removal of the selected physical disk is feasible, and, when feasible, removing the selected physical disk from the disk group without deleting the virtual disk realized by the disk group and reconstructing the virtual disk to be realized by the disk group using only the proposed number of physical disks, wherein the proposed number of physical disks is less than an initial number of physical disks of the disk group.