What does the FreeNAS community recomend for identifying physical drives in large pools.

[KenwoodFox]

I have a NetApp DS4243 shelf with a lot of hard drives and they all show up with blinky green lights but two drivers are having issues.
I use SATA to SAS backplane adapters, and when the drive is dead or disconnected, the adapters show up as devices of 0 bytes and with a throwaway serial number.
I've got two drives that show up as 0bytes, but I have no crew witch drives?

How can I find out what drives are bad?
Is it acceptable to hot-swap SAS backplane disks? The official manual says that the whole rack can be hot-swapped in an industry environment, but what about the individual drives, in the rack?
Thanks for reading!

 

[Apollo]

It makes sense to have hot-swapable drive in such context.
However, if you try to hot-swap a working drive, you will end up degrading your vdev or worse render your pool unavailable.
If you know which serial number is failing, assuming you don't have access to the label, then the better course of action would be to shutdown the server and look which of the drive are faulted.
If you can, you could perform replacement of the failing ones via the GUI so that the pool has a chance to be online and un good standing, then remove the failing drives.
This is just a suggestion.

Someone with direct experience on this could chime in.

 

[blanchet]

SOLVED - disk identification

This might sound funny, but if you have 5 disks in a raid, how do you identify the faulty drive (physically) in your NAS box?

www.ixsystems.com

GitHub - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList: FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions

FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList

github.com

Yes individual SAS or SATA disks can be hot-swapped : on Netapp you can replace the hard disks without stopping the filer.
If the disk is still spinning, pull the disk on a short distance (1 cm) and wait few minutes for the rotation end
Then you can handle the disks as usual.

To control the identification LED, on FreeBSD you can use sesutil(8) or if you have a LSI HBA, you can also use sas2ircu or sas3ircu.
It works well with LSI 3008 on Supermicro shelf, but I do not know if if will work also on a NetApp shelf.

If you cannot control the identification LED, then you have to put a tag with the serial number on each tray.

 

[KenwoodFox]

I'm still setting everything up, so I've got no pool to worry about, but when the drives don't work, they default to a meaningless fake serial number :/ I guess i could check against every single one and check which ones are present.

I also tried putting all available disks into a pool and writing them to see the activity lights, but no luck, there was no good way to determine if the lights were flashing from the write or just, idle flicker.

 

[KenwoodFox]

SOLVED - disk identification

This might sound funny, but if you have 5 disks in a raid, how do you identify the faulty drive (physically) in your NAS box?

www.ixsystems.com

GitHub - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList: FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions

FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList

github.com

Yes individual SAS or SATA disks can be hot-swapped : on Netapp you can replace the hard disks without stopping the filer.
If the disk is still spinning, pull the disk on a short distance (1 cm) and wait few minutes for the rotation end
Then you can handle the disks as usual.

To control the identification LED, on FreeBSD you can use sesutil(8) or if you have a LSI HBA, you can also use sas2ircu or sas3ircu.
It works well with LSI 3008 on Supermicro shelf, but I do not know if if will work also on a NetApp shelf.

If you cannot control the identification LED, then you have to put a tag with the serial number on each tray.

Thank you! ill try this out right away!

 

[KenwoodFox]

SOLVED - disk identification

This might sound funny, but if you have 5 disks in a raid, how do you identify the faulty drive (physically) in your NAS box?

www.ixsystems.com

GitHub - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList: FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions

FreeNas "Disklist" script for report informations about installed hard drives, volumes and partitions - nephri/FreeNas-DiskList

github.com

Yes individual SAS or SATA disks can be hot-swapped : on Netapp you can replace the hard disks without stopping the filer.
If the disk is still spinning, pull the disk on a short distance (1 cm) and wait few minutes for the rotation end
Then you can handle the disks as usual.

To control the identification LED, on FreeBSD you can use sesutil(8) or if you have a LSI HBA, you can also use sas2ircu or sas3ircu.
It works well with LSI 3008 on Supermicro shelf, but I do not know if if will work also on a NetApp shelf.

If you cannot control the identification LED, then you have to put a tag with the serial number on each tray.

That was exactly the solution i needed thank you, using `sesutil locate <disk> on` worked perfectly