Dead Drives and FreeNAS

[CAndour]

Hello,
I've been testing out FreeNAS for about a month, in preparation of building a proper NAS.
One thing I'm trying to understand is what happens when drive fails.
Example 1:

Here I've physically disconnected a drive from the system:
1. Can I see what configuration of the pool was?
2. How do I find some unique identifier for the drive, so I can easily replace without going through the process of elimination?
This was just a single drive pool, but you can't see that from the status of the pool... and I'm not going to remember in 5 years time...

Example 2:

In this pool I've removed a drive and as you can see the hot spare has done its job...
Here at least I get something on the old drive... but why the difference between this and the first screenshot (here the unavailable drive is at least listed)?

Something like a notification reporting the serial of the troublesome/dead drive would be the obvious solution, right?
Thank you for your time

 

[Glorious1]

If you've lost all the drives in your pool (or all redundancy +1), it doesn't really matter, because the pool is gone forever. Normally, with redundancy, it would still show as a pool. You could go into console or ssh into FreeNAS and do zpool status - that will tell you a fair amount.

I suggest, before you have trouble, you make a table of all your drives, indicating what pool they are on, model, serial numbers, what slots they are in in the case, drive identifier/geom name (like da0, though that might change), and gptid. You can piece all that info together with this suite of commands:

Code:

zpool status        # gptid and scrub errors
glabel status        # gptid – geom name
sudo cat /var/log/messages | grep Serial         # geom name–serial
sudo smartctl -a /dev/ada0             # geom name - serial (one drive at a time)
sudo camcontrol devlist                # model - bus/pass – geom name