Does the motherboard port a drive connects to matter?

[Alan W. Smtih]

I'm replacing a hard drive. It's in a cage that requires unplugging two other drives to get to it.

I labeled the cords and drives to make sure I plug all three get plugged back into the same SATA ports on the motherboard.

There's no mention of this being required in the documentation, but it implicitly discusses only a single drive being unplugged. So, I used the labels to be safe.

Is it necessary to make sure drives get plugged back into the same motherboard SATA port?

Or, can FreeNAS handle drives being moved between different ports?

 

[Jailer]

Is it necessary to make sure drives get plugged back into the same motherboard SATA port?

Nope.

Or, can FreeNAS handle drives being moved between different ports?

Handles it just fine as long as they are direct access just like the previous port they were on.

 

[farmerpling2]

Simple way to think about it...

There is meta data on the disk that enables ZFS to figure out what drive is connected.

30+ years ago in another dimensions, some O/S's did require the drive to be put on the same port. Now days any reasonable O/S should care less.

 

[Stux]

technically, you can take the drive out, connect it via a scsi controller, or even put it in a USB case, and it will still work... as long as the connection method allows direct access to the drive.

This is also why using a RAID card which does NOT allow direct attach drive access is a no-no.

 

[wblock]

Well... it doesn't matter to ZFS because of the metadata. Which port is used does matter for boot drives, because which drive the system boots from is handled by the BIOS before ZFS is even running.

 

[Alan W. Smtih]

Good stuff

I pretty much assumed the specific physical port wouldn't matter and that swapping them would be a solved problem. Wasn't willing to make a bet on that assumption until I got some verification though, because, you know, technology is _full_ of surprises.

Thanks for the confirmation and the note to consider boot drives if they come into the mix!

:D

 

[dominator99]

I think I read somewhere that FreeNAS identifies HDD's by their serial number so changing ports doesn't matter

 

[Ericloewe]

Once again, I'll point out that no self-respecting RAID solution gives a damn about drive location. Not any HW RAID I've seen, not Intel fakeRAID and certainly not ZFS.

The crap RAID on a chip products might, but those are best left out of any conversation.