I had my motherboard's SATA ports fully populated with sda..sdf, and inserted the first PCI 4-port card with 1 new drive. On startup, the new drive was assigned sda and all the others moved down one letter. This caused a parity rebuild to start. (I saw the 'trust my array' steps for next time)

 

Question: is the assignment of the drives controlled by the motherboard, or the unRAID/OS? Can i somehow controll this assignment so new drives are added at the end of the list instead of the beginning? Or do i really not care?

 

tia

John

I had my motherboard's SATA ports fully populated with sda..sdf, and inserted the first PCI 4-port card with 1 new drive. On startup, the new drive was assigned sda and all the others moved down one letter. This caused a parity rebuild to start. (I saw the 'trust my array' steps for next time)

 

Question: is the assignment of the drives controlled by the motherboard, or the unRAID/OS? Can i somehow controll this assignment so new drives are added at the end of the list instead of the beginning? Or do i really not care?

 

tia

John

This will only happen when you add new hardware. (in your case, a new disk controller)

 

You cannot control which hardware device is scanned first, and assigned first by Linux, (other than possibly moving the controller card to a different socket on the MB,) nor do you care.

 

Joe L.

This will only happen when you add new hardware. (in your case, a new disk controller)

since that controller is scanned first, i'd expect the other 3 drives i'll add to it in the future to also move the MB drives down the list.

 

thanks for the clarification

since that controller is scanned first, i'd expect the other 3 drives i'll add to it in the future to also move the MB drives down the list.

 

Probably.  We've gotten used to the Linux kernel moving the Device ID's around.  I have seen 3 'causes' of these moves.  The first is as you found, by adding or removing disk controllers.  The second is by upgrading the Linux kernel, you will sometimes get changes in the order of controller analysis.  Different kernel versions will find the controllers in a different order.  And the third cause is just random timing.  My USB flash drive is assigned its Device ID in the middle of the hard disks, and some times it gets sde and other boots, it gets sdf.

 

Added to the FAQ (with link back to here), here.  Feel free to edit.

Since unRAID knows disk ids which are unique is there any reason why we couldnt automatically accommodate these changes?