Hard drive shuffle

[KMR]

Hey,

I'm going to be moving to a virtualized FreeNAS setup soon (Yes I've read the docs and I will be careful) and had a question about moving drives. I have an M1015 card which I will use in PCI pass-through mode for the FreeNAS VM but I'll need to do a lot of testing on the base machine before I trust everything with my drives. This means pulling the drives from the case. I'm going to try and make sure I put them back in the same slots they came from but are there going to be any issues if I mix the order up or is ZFS smart enough to figure out which drive is which no matter what port it is plugged into?

On a related note I would like to add another 6 disk vdev which means another M1015. What if I mix up the drives down the line and plug a drive that was on one HBA in a slot that is connected to the other HBA? Am I going to blow my pool up if I don't keep the drives on the same HBA that they were set up on?

Thanks,

 

[warri]

The ports don't matter, ZFS uses meta data directly on the disk.
If you are using pass-through mode the controller shouldn't matter either (haven't tried this myself, but I'm pretty sure).

 

[ser_rhaegar]

The ports don't matter, ZFS uses meta data directly on the disk.
If you are using pass-through mode the controller shouldn't matter either (haven't tried this myself, but I'm pretty sure).

Controller doesn't matter either. I've moved disks between slots, controllers and machines without issue. Just make sure it is an HBA and not a raid controller.