February 14, 201610 yr I've looked through the forums but not finding any discussion on best practices labeling drives. Appears to me that the Drive serial number and the Dev name (SDA, SDB, etc.) is pretty much all that is needed. Does not appear to matter if you document which sata port is used. I would think that taking a screenshot of the Main mappings would be important, since the Dev name appears locked to the drive (via serial number). Do I have that right?
February 14, 201610 yr I've looked through the forums but not finding any discussion on best practices labeling drives. Appears to me that the Drive serial number and the Dev name (SDA, SDB, etc.) is pretty much all that is needed. Does not appear to matter if you document which sata port is used. I would think that taking a screenshot of the Main mappings would be important, since the Dev name appears locked to the drive (via serial number). Do I have that right? I'm not sure if the device name actually matters. SATA port used does not matter. The drive serial number matters. (This is the unique information that is stored on the flash to figure out drive assignments) The array assignment also matters (Parity and Cache assignments generally being the most important) Taking a screen shot is a good idea, or printing out a listing of the serial number and assignment. All that you really need to avoid data loss is the serial number and assignment of your drives.
February 14, 201610 yr Community Expert I've looked through the forums but not finding any discussion on best practices labeling drives. Appears to me that the Drive serial number and the Dev name (SDA, SDB, etc.) is pretty much all that is needed. Does not appear to matter if you document which sata port is used. I would think that taking a screenshot of the Main mappings would be important, since the Dev name appears locked to the drive (via serial number). Do I have that right? no, the sdX name is assigned dynamically by Linux as it first sees a drive and is independent of the serial number. Having said that it DOES tend to be consistent between boots unless you have made a change at the hardware level as normally Linux will see a given set of hardware in a given order. An easy way to see this is to physically swap two drives over to different connections and you will see the sdX values for each drives will be different to their previous values.
February 14, 201610 yr In have 3x 5in3 drive cages. I can't see the drives inside them so labels on the drives themselves won't work. So I labeled the front panel of the caddies P01, P02 (I have 2 parity drives) D01, D02, etc. Then I made a nice Word doc table layout to record drive model, serial number, date put in service, slot number. I also did some cell shading to indicate those drives connected to the RAID card vs the motherboard. I store a printed copy in a manila envelope taped to the side of the case. With all this I know who is connected to what and for how long.
February 14, 201610 yr You can try using my ServerLayout plugin http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40223.0
February 14, 201610 yr Interwebtech, How did you RAID 0 the parity drives? I'm curious being an unRAID/Linux noob.
February 14, 201610 yr Using a RAID card, I created a RAID0 volume across 2 disks. It then shows up in unRAID as a drive that can be added to the array in this case as the parity drive.
February 14, 201610 yr Author You can try using my ServerLayout plugin http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40223.0 Nice Plugin!! This is very helpful.
February 15, 201610 yr Community Expert You can try using my ServerLayout plugin http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40223.0 yes thanks for this! now i just have to shutdown, and peek at which slots the drives are in.. .but will prevent a lot of future trial and error when replacing drives
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