Replacing Drives (Missing Serial #)

[somethingtohide]

I'm replacing each of the drives in my FreeNAS setup with bigger drives. I already have a 3-2-1 backup tested and working, and I've replaced failed drives, so this would not have been an issue for me except that...

I'd rather not take out a drive and replace it when missing, so I put a new drive into my HDD Dock and let it replace overnight. This morning I swapped the replaced drive with the new one, and now I'm in a degraded state! It turns out that this dock does not expose the serial number of the drive, so FreeNAS was using some generic string instead, and now that's technically missing and I have a new drive that's not in the pool (even though it technically has all the right data in it.

My question is, how do I go about this process in the best way? Is there any way to make FreeNAS recognize this new drive by updating the serial numbers somewhere? I guess in the worst-case scenario I'm finding a new dock or replacing drives with one of them offline.

 

[Jailer]

Does this dock also block smart data?

 

[somethingtohide]

It doesn't; I had run smartlctl on it during the resilvering to check the drive and its temperature, and it seemed fine. At this point I have swapped the first replaced drive with the newly resilvered one, and have another drive on the dock. smartctl on this docked drive does list the new and valid serial number, but the serial in View Disks is that same generic string as before: DB98765432B6B

Perhaps FreeNAS has recognized and stored a temporary serial, or maybe one the dock shows before the drive is initialized, and isn't updating it later on? I'm not sure as this time I had the dock's power on before FreeNAS even booted.

 

[Jailer]

ZFS needs direct access to the drives to be able to perform monitoring and testing functions and alert you if something is wrong. If your controller is not passing smart info to FreeNAS then you have no way of knowing when a drive may be failing.

 

[somethingtohide]

The dock does pass smartctl data, running smartctl -a /dev/da1 (where it's located) provides a full SMART report, including the accurate serial, manufacturer, etc. of the loaded drive.

The dmesg output when booting is what lists the 'fake' serial number, presumably of the dock itself. The gptid and serial of this new drive is thus incorrectly recognized, and when the drive is replaced and loaded normally in a SATA slot, it doesn't recognize it as the replaced drive and so it's not part of the pool anymore.

Here's the zpool status after moving the drive from the dock to inside the computer:

Code:

10450583162568996699							UNAVAIL	  0	 0	 0  was /dev/gptid/597257c5-f45c-11e8-8c2c-bc5ff4e79a71.eli
	   gptid/f34641b0-b955-11e4-84ef-bc5ff4e79a71.eli  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
	   gptid/f3c6d3d9-b955-11e4-84ef-bc5ff4e79a71.eli  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
	   gptid/a4b6219f-65e8-11e8-9b13-bc5ff4e79a71.eli  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0

Now that it's in the computer, the gptid and serial are correct (for the drive), but different than it was in the drive.

Is there any way for FreeNAS/ZFS to update its expected drive IDs such that it recognizes the drive again? Otherwise, I'm going to have to replace this drive again (the old one is offlined/removed, and the new one is not recognized, and I don't know of a way for it to recognize either of them again), and for the next few drives leave them hanging out the machine but directly connected via SATA instead of the dock.

 

[Chris Moore]

The ID being different is the problem. You can not use that dock you need to replace that drive again. It is not recognized as the same drive.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[somethingtohide]

Yeah I was afraid of this. Even putting the same drive back into the dock and it didn't recognize it across reboots. I'm replacing that now-unrecognized drive with one that's plugged in normally through SATA. It's taking longer and is more dangerous, but after this one I'll use another SATA port and keep the cats away from the open case.

 

[Chris Moore]

I recommend using a SAS HBA instead of SATA

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk