SOLVED Only one of multiple drives with same ident shows up in web UI

[phistep]

Hello there. I am new to FreeBSD (but a Linux user), so I'm sorry in advance if this is obvious.

I want to repurpose my old laptop as a NAS, so I installed proxmox and a TrueNAS vm in there. I bought four brand new 2TB drives, which I added to a bay which is connected via a single USB3 port to the machine. I forwarded the host USB device from proxmox to the TrueNAS vm. During the installation, all four drives were selectable as installation drive (but I chose the fifth option: qemu drive). Now I wanted to create a RAIDZ1 storage pool from these drives using the TrueNAS web UI. Unfortunately, only one of them (the one with the highest numerical id `da3` shows up under Disks or during the zpool wizard. (See attached screenshot)

I did some googling (as `lsblk` left me out of luck, haha), but it turns out, TrueNAS does actually see all the drives:

Code:

root@truenas[~]# camcontrol devlist
<QEMU HARDDISK 2.5+>               at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0)
<QEMU QEMU DVD-ROM 2.5+>           at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (cd0,pass1)
<WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1 >           at scbus3 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass2)
<WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1 >           at scbus3 target 0 lun 1 (da1,pass3)
<WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1 >           at scbus3 target 0 lun 2 (da2,pass4)
<WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1 >           at scbus3 target 0 lun 3 (da3,pass5)

Code:

root@truenas[~]# geom disk list
Geom name: ada0
Providers:
1. Name: ada0
   Mediasize: 34359738368 (32G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r1w1e2
   descr: QEMU HARDDISK
   ident: QM00001
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 16

Geom name: cd0
Providers:
1. Name: cd0
   Mediasize: 963100672 (918M)
   Sectorsize: 2048
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: QEMU QEMU DVD-ROM
   ident: (null)
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 0
   fwheads: 0

Geom name: da0
Providers:
1. Name: da0
   Mediasize: 2000398934016 (1.8T)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1
   ident: D2A3130FFFFF
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 255

Geom name: da1
Providers:
1. Name: da1
   Mediasize: 2000398934016 (1.8T)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1
   ident: D2A3130FFFFF
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 255

Geom name: da2
Providers:
1. Name: da2
   Mediasize: 2000398934016 (1.8T)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1
   ident: D2A3130FFFFF
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 255

Geom name: da3
Providers:
1. Name: da3
   Mediasize: 2000398934016 (1.8T)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: WDC WD20 EFAX-68B2RN1
   ident: D2A3130FFFFF
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 255

As you can see, all the drives are absolutely identical, with same description and ID. Maybe this is the problem (although I can hardly imagine that using identical drives is an uncommon use case?) Anyway, I did some googling and also searched this forum for "identical drives" and "disk not showing up in TrueNAS" but to no avail. I hope this is not wasting everyones time, but I don't really know what to do.

How can I get all my identical drives show up in the web UI and use the zpool creation whizard?

 

[jgreco]

Most likely answer? You don't. This isn't expected to work properly, and even if it did, you'd just run into more problems. You have variations on some of the problems discussed in this article:

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA...

www.truenas.com

Except you've added a bonus multiplier in the form of putting the badness at the end of a USB connection. This is going to run into a lot of problems if you try to make any serious use of it.

 

[phistep]

Thank you for your honest answer. Obviously, that's pretty bad. What would you suggest I do from here?

Ditch the USB bay and get a SATA cotroller that is RAID capable (but no hardware raid)? I'm not even sure I could pull that off with the motherboard from my old Thinkpad. It claims it has "PCIe Mini Card: Two PCI Express Mini Card slots", but so far I've only seen SATA controllers that require 4x PCIe. I could remove WWAN and WLAN cards as I will run on ehternet only anyway, but then the four PCIe slots will not be adjacent and I don't even know if they would be positioned in a way that would make it possible to attach a SATA controller card with four slots.

Ugh this is definitely getting more complicated than I anticipated. All the professional TrueNAS servers are pretty expensive and seem like more than I would need. Can you maybe recommend a budget build, in case I have to ditch the reuse-old-laptop idea as well :/

Maybe using the Two PCIe mini card slots to run two 1-2 SATA port multipliers would reduce the badness enough that I could live with it? Could I make that work in principle, even if it is discouraged? And what would be the severe consequences? Read/Write performance is honestly not that important, I'll mostly just use it as overnight backup and long term storage of files I need to access seldomly.

 

[jgreco]

I don't have any particular suggestions, but there's a bunch of others out there in the forums. Look in the signatures of people.

 

[phistep]

After reading up on a lot more resources and carefully considering my options (which, duh, I should have done in the first place), I realized that a RAID is probably not even what I want. And TrueNAS is probably cracking a walnut with a sledge hammer here. I now went for openmediavault on two of the disks and rsync mirroring to the other two. That seems much more reasonable for my requirements.

Thank you again for your patience and honest answer, I appreciate it!