Identifying individual disks

[geopfarth]

Not sure how you guys do it but here is what I did:

1:) copied out all of the drive serial numbers
2:) identified the physical slot each of the serial numbers inhabits
3:) opened the Freenas>Storage>Volumes>[myvolume]>View Disks
4:) Edited the disks so that the "description" field contained the physical drive location

If there is a better way, please let me know. I dropped a disk last night and it took me a while to figure out which one it was, even though I had completed steps 1 and 2 in my notebook for the build.

 

[BigDave]

When your machine boots, the disks are assigned a "da" number (from the OS) as they become available during the powerup/spinup process.
This process does not always happen exactly the same every time it boots, the numbers can and do change. It is rare, but it happens.

When and if this occurs, it does not matter to ZFS, but to your description entries, they may become fouled up a bit.:p

Generally speaking it's best to keep track using the serial numbers, when a drive goes
down, all you need to find is the missing serial number and you have your problem identified.

 

[Stux]

I have drive activity lights on all my drives. If I want to identify a drive I dd from the drive to dev null.

This lights up the activity light

Or sometimes from all the drives except the one I want.

 

[Scharbag]

I have drive activity lights on all my drives. If I want to identify a drive I dd from the drive to dev null.

This lights up the activity light

Or sometimes from all the drives except the one I want.

I have also had good luck with sas2ircu commands if you are using LSI HBAs.