A technique manages the addition of disks to a volume of a storage system. A disk addition procedure is encapsulated into a DISKADD object conforming to a configuration management framework used to implement a RAID subsystem of the storage system. The DISKADD object is responsible for determining a set of available disks required to satisfy a disk addition request issued by an operator through a user interface of a storage operating system executing on the storage system. Furthermore, the DISKADD object is responsible for monitoring the state of the disks, including preparation/initialization of the disks (e.g., disk zeroing) and possible disk failures, as well as placing those disks into RAID groups of the volume once preparation completes. Persistent storage of the state of a pending disk addition is then accomplished using an implementation of the configuration management framework.