Hello rayquaza
"I have a 2 node vSAN witness cluster "
Do you mean a 2-node Stretched/DirectConnect cluster + a Witness?
"using all HDDs."
Not possible unless you went far into unsupported and marked some HDDs as flash devices, do you mean it is a Hybrid configuration? (e.g. SSD/NVMe as Cache-tier and HDDs as Capacity-tier)
"What would cause the system not to have permissions to write a file system on a drive? And, how do I resolve this?"
The devices could have become read-only or if this is a nested/micro setup maybe they had insufficient memory to create/mount the Disk-Groups.
"The current result is that the disk groups get created (with errors) and only 1/3 of my datastore size is available for use. "
Please elaborate on the configuration of this cluster e.g. is this a nested lab or is it all metal servers with all relevant components (SSDs, HDDs and controllers) on the vSAN HCL?
"This is not very useful if I want to implement it in a production environment."
If this is a production environment then please open a case with GSS so that we can properly investigate the source of the issue.
If it is a homelab then please provide a lot lot more information and do the necessary due diligence of narrowing down the problem area (e.g. are the disks groups created, check #vdq -Hi ,are the disks in CMMDS , do the Disk-Groups get mounted at boot or are they failing with LSOM Out of memory, what is vmkernel.log saying? etc.).
Bob