Hard Disk Serial Numbers not Posting in view disks window.

[Headroadie2004]

Howdy. I just upgraded my WHS box to Freenas 8.3. I have 24 WD 2TB Green Drives from the WHS build. (Yes I know thats bad but I have bought these before they came out with the Red drives. I think I will switch over little at a time.) I recently decided to upgrade the hardware from desktop components to server components so heres what I have below:

Mobo: 1- SUPERMICRO MBD-X9DRD-7LN4F-O
CPU: 1- Intel Xeon E5-2609 Sandy Bridge-EP 2.4GHz
Memory: 8- Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1333 Server Memory QR x8 1.35V Server Hynix C Model KVR13LR9Q8/8HC 64gb
SAS- 2- on board LSI (seeing Serial numbers with these)
2- areca ARC-1320-8I (2 Cards, no serials from these)

Ok heres the problem. I have everything installed and working finally. I had to install the driver for the Areca cards to show up in FreeNAS. I see the drives as da0, da1, da2, da3. da4 and da5 are connected to the SAS on the mobo and those are reporting their serial numbers. Is there something I can do to make FreeNAS refresh to see the serials. I have rebooted my system several times and nothing has help. Could this be a driver issue on the Areca cards.

 

[bollar]

I don't know the answer, but I love your system...

 

[cyberjock]

Obviously your Areca cards' drivers are not part of FreeNAS by default. I've had this problem with a couple of controllers, so I can help you out here.

It appears that Areca card support was attempted to be added in September. See changes made at http://support.freenas.org/search?q=areca. It looks like some changes to the Areca CLI were made too if you read those entries. I'm not sure what was entailed with those changes or if anything was broken. In any case, if you are using 8.3(which you said you are) then your areca card should have worked out-of-the-box with FreeNAS. Since it didn't here's what you should do:

1. Go to support.freenas.org. Open a ticket to request the driver be included with FreeNAS as well as add support for serials and SMART(if SMART doesn't work.. I'm betting it doesn't). I'd mention the changes in that search results and the developer that added all of those changes (jpaetzel).
2. Being that all those changes were implemented and the card still didn't work, there's likely a reason why it didn't work. Either there's a technical reason or no developers had physical access to one of the cards so they couldn't verify their changes were made(this is where you get to be a beta tester).
3. Ask the developers if they want/need SSH access to your server temporarily to setup serials/drivers/SMART. I'm willing to bet they'll say they need access to the machine if you want serials and/or SMART to work.

If you aren't too interested with giving a developer root access to your server then my comment would be "well.. you're on your own to get serials working". I've given a developer access to 2 of my FreeNAS servers(one had personal data on it) in the past for serials and SMART setup. It's not something that can usually be coded easily. The developers REALLY do sometimes need access to the hardware to make it work. If you aren't okay with that, that's fine. Just don't expect serials to miraculously start working ;)

I have a FreeNAS server setup as an experimental test machine right now for one of the developers so he can add serial and SMART support to a new generation of RAID controllers that recently hit the market. It has no data on it, but he can log in remotely and experiment to his heart's content.

 

[Stephens]

Howdy. I just upgraded my WHS box to Freenas 8.3. I have 24 WD 2TB Green Drives from the WHS build. (Yes I know thats bad but I have bought these before they came out with the Red drives. I think I will switch over little at a time.)

If a drive fails, replace it with a Red. Otherwise I'd just use wdidle3 and not worry about it.

 

[Headroadie2004]

How about returning the Areca cards and getting LSI cards since that is what is built into the mobo. It seems like the LSI cards work. I'm not sure how important it is to have all the SAS cards from the same manufacturer. I'm not that savvy on setting up a SSH tunnel either. I haven't loaded any data on the server yet so remote access doesn't seem that big of deal to me.

 

[cyberjock]

How about returning the Areca cards and getting LSI cards since that is what is built into the mobo. It seems like the LSI cards work. I'm not sure how important it is to have all the SAS cards from the same manufacturer. I'm not that savvy on setting up a SSH tunnel either. I haven't loaded any data on the server yet so remote access doesn't seem that big of deal to me.

SSH can bet setup using the FreeNAS manual. It's pretty easy. You'll have to setup port forwarding in your router to allow anyone from the internet to get through the firewall. If you can't get SSH to work(I hadn't setup SSH in FreeBSD or FreeNAS until February) or you don't know how to setup port forwarding you probably aren't a good choice to be beta testing and helping out the developers since you aren't an advanced user.


Wdidle3 doesn't affect TLER. If you haven't setup the drives with wdidle3 you should fix them. There's alot of posts around the forum discussing wdidle3 and what it does. I have all green drives in my FreeNAS server and they work fine...after you setup wdidle3. If you don't you potentially are looking at drives with SMART drive failures potentially in as little as a 2-3 months.

 

[Headroadie2004]

Ok thanks for the info I will look into both of the things you have mentioned.

 

[Andy Smith]

I have the same problem i have setup m2-mirrored drives but can not see the discs in the view status window.
I am using an Intell DH67BL mobo with 8gb of ddr3 1333 danelec ram.
With 2 500gb sagate sata hdd.