Derrick Ryalls wrote:
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Steve Polyack <kor...@comcast.net> wrote:
Derrick Ryalls wrote:
1) In the event of a disk failure, how do I trace back the name such
as adX to a physical drive in the enclosure?  Is there a way to take
the drive offline then use atacontrol to spin it down or something so
it is easy to identify?

In my opinion you are best off using glabel(8) to give names to the disks.
 This way you can name them in a way that makes sense to you.  Additionally,
when you create the ZFS pool you will use the glabel'd names.  This means
that the pool will still come up properly if something causes your devices
to be numbered differently (i.e. a drive dies and you happen to reboot the
system).

I believe ZFS does this automatically.  Supposedly, if you take a
working set of RAIDZ drives from one machine and put it in another,
ZFS will figure out the drives since they get labelled by ZFS
internally.  My question concerns how to identify the physical disk in
question based on the adX or glabel name?  Different name in software
is fine, but if the drive fails I want to make sure I pull the correct
drive.

This is possible, but I don't remember reading that ZFS handles this anywhere, and I've seen glabel(8) recommended elsewhere for the same reason. Either way, you can add your drives one-by-one and label them on the enclosure "arraydrive00" and then glabel the individual disks with the same name. This way when ZFS tells you "arraydrive03" is dead/offline, you can look at your enclosure and pull the drive with the arraydrive03 label.
Depending on your controller it is also probably worth it to use one of the
SATA-specific drivers in FreeBSD 8 - these are ones like ahci(4) and
siis(4).  While the generic ata(4) driver will work for pretty much
everything, the updated AHCI drivers can take advantage of some more
features.  Enable the modules at boot to use them.

I will look into it, thanks.  The machine in question is 2 year old
hardware currently with a 3ware raid card.  I will be going software
raid only, but FreeBSD already recognizes the eSATA drive I have
attached as a backup device so I know the O/S can at least talk to
sata drives attached to the mobo.


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