I am trying to do what is described in this post, that is hook up an eSATA connector to one of the unused SATA ports on the motherboard. I realize that eSATA isn't super reliable, but my use case is to plug a drive, create a pool on the drive, use zfs send / receive to backup my datasets, and then unmount and remove the drive - or in other words the tenuous eSATA connection would only be active for short, supervised periods of time. I have the mechanics and cabling for this worked out.
The problem I am seeing is that while I can hot plug a drive (console / dmesg shows the new drive), I can't figure out how to hot-unplug a drive. If I just yank the drive out, nothing shows up in dmesg, if I try to mess with the device after I have yanked it out it understandably becomes unhappy. A bit of searching around suggested that the "camcontrol eject" command may be what I need, but when I try that it tells me there was an error in the attempt.
The above, by the way, is the behavior when I use the 4 empty blue SATA connectors by the back of the case. If I use the one empty white connector toward the front, hot plugging a drive in doesn't seem to be detected at all (it does show up at the next boot.)
So my question is should I expect this to work on the FreeNAS mini hardware? I assume hot swap is supported in some fashion as the four external bays certainly imply hot swapping... If it is expected to work, should it be using the blue or white SATA ports (and should it matter)? and finally, is there a command I can issue to eject or remove the drive cleanly? (Note I understand how to import / export the pool itself, I am asking for help at the physical device level below zfs.)
The problem I am seeing is that while I can hot plug a drive (console / dmesg shows the new drive), I can't figure out how to hot-unplug a drive. If I just yank the drive out, nothing shows up in dmesg, if I try to mess with the device after I have yanked it out it understandably becomes unhappy. A bit of searching around suggested that the "camcontrol eject" command may be what I need, but when I try that it tells me there was an error in the attempt.
The above, by the way, is the behavior when I use the 4 empty blue SATA connectors by the back of the case. If I use the one empty white connector toward the front, hot plugging a drive in doesn't seem to be detected at all (it does show up at the next boot.)
So my question is should I expect this to work on the FreeNAS mini hardware? I assume hot swap is supported in some fashion as the four external bays certainly imply hot swapping... If it is expected to work, should it be using the blue or white SATA ports (and should it matter)? and finally, is there a command I can issue to eject or remove the drive cleanly? (Note I understand how to import / export the pool itself, I am asking for help at the physical device level below zfs.)