SOLVED "View Disks" not displaying all disks & generic serial

[investigate_311]

Hi guys,

Pretty new to FreeNAS: I've got it installed on an old i5-3230M Acer laptop with 8GB RAM.
Removed the Mini-PCI-E WLAN card and put in a USB 3 one to allow connection of a 4 bay JBOD enclosure with a jumble of old disks (I wanted to use what I had available before coughing up for new disks).

I've created 2 pools; storage & backup. Storage spans a single 6TB disk & Backup spans x1 2TB & x2 1TB disks. Storage pool then has a single dataset on it & Backup pool has two, one for Time Machine & the other for Windows backups (I know there's no redundancy here).

Shares are created and every machine on the LAN can see & connect to what it's supposed to.

I'm having doubts about the disks in the Backup pool (the x2 1TB's are WD Greens) so I wanted to run a Long SMART test on each... enter my problem, the view disks tab under storage only shows a single disk and not always the same one however the serial for the disk is always the same "0123456789ABCDEF". Going to the "volume status" page for each pool shows which disks compose it and obviously each disk was viewable when I created the volumes with volume manager.

When I go to add SMART test under Tasks, again only one disk is displayed.

Having read through some similar threads on the forum I have tried clearing my browser cache & cookies (using Safari on OS X 10.10) as well as using different browsers (Chrome & Firefox) and various browsers on different machines with different OS's (Win 7 & Win 10). Still only see one disk in the "view disks" tab.

Hoping some light can be shed on my issue, any help is appreciated :)

 

[Spearfoot]

Hi guys,

Pretty new to FreeNAS: I've got it installed on an old i5-3230M Acer laptop with 8GB RAM.
Removed the Mini-PCI-E WLAN card and put in a USB 3 one to allow connection of a 4 bay JBOD enclosure with a jumble of old disks (I wanted to use what I had available before coughing up for new disks).

I've created 2 pools; storage & backup. Storage spans a single 6TB disk & Backup spans x1 2TB & x2 1TB disks. Storage pool then has a single dataset on it & Backup pool has two, one for Time Machine & the other for Windows backups (I know there's no redundancy here).

Shares are created and every machine on the LAN can see & connect to what it's supposed to.

I'm having doubts about the disks in the Backup pool (the x2 1TB's are WD Greens) so I wanted to run a Long SMART test on each... enter my problem, the view disks tab under storage only shows a single disk and not always the same one however the serial for the disk is always the same "0123456789ABCDEF". Going to the "volume status" page for each pool shows which disks compose it and obviously each disk was viewable when I created the volumes with volume manager.

When I go to add SMART test under Tasks, again only one disk is displayed.

Having read through some similar threads on the forum I have tried clearing my browser cache & cookies (using Safari on OS X 10.10) as well as using different browsers (Chrome & Firefox) and various browsers on different machines with different OS's (Win 7 & Win 10). Still only see one disk in the "view disks" tab.

Hoping some light can be shed on my issue, any help is appreciated :)

You're running FreeNAS on a laptop with an external USB 3.0 drive enclosure. That's not a supported configuration; it's a wonder you were able to get it to work at all... FreeNAS needs direct access to the disks, not via a USB card.

 

[investigate_311]

Right, so it's a miracle any of it is working at all basically!
The setup is far from ideal and was me just trying to give old equipment a new lease of life, albeit tucked away under the stairs.

Do you reckon I'd gain back the ability for SMART monitoring & viewing all of the disks attached by swapping out the Mini-PCIE USB3 card for one of these?

https://www.startech.com/uk/Cards-A...-Internal-SATA-II-Controller-Card~MPEXSATA22I

And I know, I know... I'm choking myself trying to achieve all of this with an old laptop rather than building a dedicated NAS with RAID, ECC RAM and all the rest... That's just not an option at the moment.

Thanks for your help btw

 

[Spearfoot]

Right, so it's a miracle any of it is working at all basically!
The setup is far from ideal and was me just trying to give old equipment a new lease of life, albeit tucked away under the stairs.

Do you reckon I'd gain back the ability for SMART monitoring & viewing all of the disks attached by swapping out the Mini-PCIE USB3 card for one of these?

https://www.startech.com/uk/Cards-A...-Internal-SATA-II-Controller-Card~MPEXSATA22I

It might work... but I'm skeptical! :)

And I know, I know... I'm choking myself trying to achieve all of this with an old laptop rather than building a dedicated NAS with RAID, ECC RAM and all the rest... That's just not an option at the moment.

Thanks for your help btw

You're very welcome, and I understand your quandary. Server-class hardware can be expensive.

You might be better off just buying something like a USB-based Western Digital MyBook with enough capacity to store your data. FreeNAS just isn't intended for use on a laptop with sketchy connections to the hard drives.

 

[Jailer]

When I go to add SMART test under Tasks, again only one disk is displayed.

And this is exactly why you were given the advice that @Spearfoot gave you.

 

[DrKK]

Yeah, no.

Strongly recommend you do not run FreeNAS in this configuration. You will experience data loss and heartache with probability 92.772%

 

[investigate_311]

probability 92.772%

Show your working! :p