Best Practices - setting up hardware

[headconnect]

So - my cases and two of the disks arrived today, motherboard and all the rest ready for pickup tomorrow. Right now I'm having that buzzing jittery feeling and making sure that I've checked all the boxes.

However, as much as I've played around in vbox - there's one thing that's still lingering..

How can I reliably ensure that I can find the correct physical disk which must be replaced in the unthinkable event that something should ever happen (hehe)?

I can plug the disks in to sata ports marked 1..2..3..4..5... but are we sure that they will relate to ada1, 2, 3?

This feels like a silly question, but it's simply one I don't have an answer for right now - and it'd make me feel a whole lot better having set it up (and marked the disks) correctly from the start so that I don't have to ask the question when a problem actually arises :)

 

[Bohs Hansen]

When you view your disks in the interface, you can see the "serial" and "Identifier" value of each drive. I don't know if they go along as you asked, but these 2 infos should at least help

 

[headconnect]

As long as i can map those to the physical markungs on the board, that should do it. I just don't want to be in the position of having a dead disk and replacing the wrong one.. :)

I know you have a pretty damn near identical setup (and that fractal hd cage is a wonderfully glorified tin can by the way, love it though) - so how did you do it?

 

[Bohs Hansen]

do you mean how i match actual hdd to os name? The serial number of the hdd's is printed on the label for me, those i can see in the "view disks" tab in the webGUI - screenshot and done.

For the case that they do go along, I've printed labels for all cables inside the case for both ends and for all replaceable parts like the hdd's (dymo rules ^^)

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

I sit with the same problem, but on a larger scale.

Using a 16bay SuperMicro Server with removable HDD bay, which has 2 lights on each bay, it would be nice to have way to set the faulty HDD's light to red. Any RAID card can this and I've seen many cheap commercial NAS's do this as well, with normal software RAID. From what I understand it's the SES2, the successor to SAF-TE, or SGPIO (the successor to SES2) that tells the lights what the HDD status is. But, how (if possible) would one control those commands from FreeNAS. Or rather from FreeBSD?

Now imagine using a 38 bay, or even 72 bay chassis. It would make life soooo much easier to just see which HDD(s) have failed than trying to figure out from the HDD names in FreeNAS interface?

 

[esamett]

You can see the disk serial number from the GUI now. I number each drive with ink and scan the label into my computer. This way I can correlate and find any future offending disk. Its a bit cumbersome but workable if you are willing to do the work on the front end.