Reconnecting Drives to Same SATA Ports?

[EnigmaNas]

I have what I think is a simple question that I haven't been able to answer by searching. I am planning to do some reconfiguring of some of my hardware, which will require that I physically disconnect the hard drives in my working FreeNAS machine, and reconnect them after a while. My question is, do I need to reconnect them back to the same SATA ports they were connected to originally? Meaning the same drives on the same ports? Or can I just hook them back up in any order and let FreeNAS sort them out by serial number or something?
Thanks.

 

[c77dk]

It depends on how you have added the drives to the pool - if it's by gptid (recommended) or partition. Check with "zpool status" which type you use.

If it's by gptid you can move them around as you please, but if it's by partition you have to put them the same place.

 

[EnigmaNas]

Thank you, but try as I might, I cannot find that information. Can you tell me precisely where I would find it?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Enter zpool status and report the output here.

 

[EnigmaNas]

Enter zpool status and report the output here.

Ok, so I'm about to show my true Noobness but, are you referring to "Pool Status", because I cannot find a "ZPool Status", and is there an easy way to post the results here? or do I simply take a screenshot?
Thank you for your patience.

 

[Constantin]

Fire up your browser, log into your FreeNAS, scroll down to >Shell menu item on the left, click on that, and you should be presented with a "shell" in the window on the right. Move your mouse pointer to that field, perhaps you need click on on it. Now enter "zpool status" at the command line, hit return, copy the resultant output, and paste it in your next message here. Ideally, post it inside a "</> Code" series of inline inserts (see the three dots *** next to the smilie emoticon in the menu bar above your message field) to preserve line spacing.

If there isn't a lot of output (such as GPTIDs), you could also try "zpool status -v". Below is a sample FreeNAS output from a posting at ServerFault, your output should look somewhat similar.

Code:

# zpool status -v
  pool: raid2
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
    attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
    using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: none requested
config:

    NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    raid2                                           ONLINE       0     0     0
      raidz1                                        ONLINE       0     0     0
        gptid/5f3c0517-3ff2-11e2-9437-f46d049aaeca  ONLINE       0     0     0
        gptid/5fe33556-3ff2-11e2-9437-f46d049aaeca  ONLINE       3 1.13M     0
        gptid/60570005-3ff2-11e2-9437-f46d049aaeca  ONLINE       0     0     0
        gptid/60ebeaa5-3ff2-11e2-9437-f46d049aaeca  ONLINE       0     0     0
        gptid/61925b86-3ff2-11e2-9437-f46d049aaeca  ONLINE       0     0     0

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

@Constantin I just want to see if the devices are referenced by GPTID to answer the original question, so no -v needed. Plus in my opinion we should not encourage people to use the web shell. It's broken, copy & paste does not work.
@EnigmaNas I was referring to the command line. Please look up how to connect to your NAS via SSH. This is mandatory for runnig anything Linux or FreeBSD based. You will need that skill sooner or later.

Short version:
Enable "permit root login with password" in the SSH service
Enable the SSH service
Use an appropriate SSH program for your desktop operating system to connect
Once logged in, type zpool status ENTER
Copy & paste the output here in a code block

Thanks,
Patrick

 

[EnigmaNas]

Thank you Constantin. great instructions!

Code:

        boot-pool   ONLINE       0     0     0
          ada0p2    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
root@TrueNAS[~]# zpool status -v
  pool: AllDataPool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: resilvered 1.17T in 03:41:09 with 0 errors on Fri Feb  5 03:52:35 2021
config:

        NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        AllDataPool                                     ONLINE       0     0 0
          raidz2-0                                      ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/aa7f1f09-3c62-11eb-b10e-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/6ee8c442-675b-11eb-b432-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/bcad2202-6789-11eb-b432-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/b70f6a19-3c62-11eb-b10e-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/bb61df80-3c62-11eb-b10e-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/bd4ded61-3c62-11eb-b10e-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0
            gptid/bece116b-3c62-11eb-b10e-842b2ba5b89b  ONLINE       0     0 0

errors: No known data errors

  pool: boot-pool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:00:18 with 0 errors on Thu Feb  4 03:45:18 2021
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Your disks are connected by their respective GPTID. You can move connectors as you like.

 

[EnigmaNas]

And it appears that my drives are gptid, so I should be able to connect the drives to any SATA port and have them recognized correctly. That is good because it would really help to have the drives physically arranged in a way that supports their deployment.
Thanks

 

[EnigmaNas]

Your disks are connected by their respective GPTID. You can move connectors as you like.

Thank you also Patrick.
BTW, I noticed that I should include my system information in this same manner when posting about problems. Could you tell me which command I would enter to display the system information I would need to add to my post?
Thanks again.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Could you tell me which command I would enter to display the system information I would need to add to my post?

The simplest method is to create a signature in your account. To create the blue buttons, use the 3 dots pulldown, and select Inline spoiler.

 

[EnigmaNas]

The simplest method is to create a signature in your account. To create the blue buttons, use the 3 dots pulldown, and select Inline spoiler.

Thanks Samuel, and that looks like a good way to display the info, but I need to know how to get the info in the first place. Which command do I enter in the shell console to bring up the required information? (which I will then paste between inline spoiler tags).

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The info about my system was all collected manually. Of course I know what I bought and what I mounted in my system.

 

[Samuel Tai]

There's really no simple command; you'll need to collect the info manually. dmidecode will tell you what the BIOS sees, and some of that can be extracted. If your system has an IPMI interface for lights-out management, you could run various ipmitool subcommands to gather additional data.

 

[danb35]

It depends on how you have added the drives to the pool

Unless you were manually managing your pool at the CLI, which is strongly discouraged, it would be by gptid.

 

[rvassar]

Your disks are connected by their respective GPTID. You can move connectors as you like.

Caviat... One boot device needs to be reachable by whatever your BIOS requires...

 

[Constantin]

Yes, boot devices tend to be done by SATA port at the BIOS level. Thankfully, even if you have to drop into the BIOS boot sequence menu, the selection of boot disks is pretty usually pretty simple - they are easy to identify based on their capacity and type.

After every major disk re-org, I’d review the boot sequence and also adjust other storage-related settings in the BIOS. For example, some BIOS’ like to be told whether a particular drive at the end of the SATA connection is a SSD or not.

I’m still struggling with all that on a C2750D4I server where it will allow me to select the first of two mirrored boot disks as boot option #1, but not add the second as boot option #2 for some reason. Very frustrating.

 

[tessierp]

Hi,

When I type zpool status I get the following list, I noticed my drives are listed with UUIDs however they do not have the gptid in front. Does that mean I have to reconnect the drives with their respective HBA and SATA ports?

pool: MAIN
state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,
the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 03:15:36 with 0 errors on Sun Oct 15 03:15:38 2023
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
MAIN ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3a86428-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4997696-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4c145cb-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4910958-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5720668-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c57ae2de-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5a324be-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5adb8fc-4c75-11ec-b658-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

pool: SPEED
state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,
the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:00:03 with 0 errors on Sun Oct 15 00:00:04 2023
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
SPEED ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
5e457ad0-4ce0-11ec-a700-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0
5e4a8091-4ce0-11ec-a700-d05099df7916 ONLINE 0 0 0

 

[rvassar]

Hi,

When I type zpool status I get the following list, I noticed my drives are listed with UUIDs however they do not have the gptid in front. Does that mean I have to reconnect the drives with their respective HBA and SATA ports?

I don't see any errors reported there. What makes you think you need to?

But this is the legacy FreeNAS section of the forum. Virtually everything here is going to relate to older versions of the FreeBSD derived TrueNAS. If you're running Linux derived TrueNAS Scale, you should ask in one of the Scale forums. You'll get better answers. I suspect Linux implements a slightly different UUID naming scheme. But I'm still on TrueNAS Core, so that's a flat out guess. Also, please follow posting guidelines by including a system description.