I take it that some of these numbers tell me which controller and port my IDE drive is connected to.  Can anyone tell me how to deipher them?

Well obviously, the first 3 are your SATA drives.  The IDE controllers aren't named, but you can make some conclusions about them.  I'll call them Controller 1 (C1), Controller 2 (C2), and Controller 3 (C3), and you should be able to identify them by their differences.  Controller 1 has a single cable and 2 drives (hda, hdb).  Controller 2 has 2 cables and 4 drives (hdi, hdj, hdk, hdl).  Controller 3 has 2 cables and 3 drives (hde, hdf, hdh).

 

Disk3  (hdb) on C1, Primary Slave - Samsung 400

Disk4  (hde) on C3, Primary Master - Maxtor 200

Disk5  (hdi) on C2, Primary Master - Maxtor 200

Disk6  (hdj) on C2, Primary Slave - Maxtor 200

Disk7  (hdk) on C2, Secondary Master - Maxtor 200

Disk8  (hdl) on C2, Secondary Slave - Maxtor 200

Disk9  (hda) on C1, Primary Master - Maxtor 200

Disk10 (hdf) on C3, Primary Slave - Maxtor 200

Disk11 (hdh) on C3, Secondary Slave - Seagate 400

 

That's the way it looks to me, but I could certainly be wrong.  Someone else may correct or expand on the above.

 

I can definitely see the pattern, but I wonder if there is a way to be certain which controller a drive is plugged into.  For example, I just copied the contents of disk5&6 to disk11.  I now want to remove them from the array.  My server is down in the basement and my desktop is on the second floor.  I don't want to have to run down and unplug the drives, run back up to see if disk5&6 are then missing and not two other drives, and repeat until I get the right drives.  It would be much easier is there was a way to know for sure.  I put in a feature request asking that unraid show the controller info or something.

Do you have the MD1200 ?

 

I guess you just could do the old way, note the serial number of each drive and put a sticker on each machine drive 

You'll only have to do it once.

I started having the same problem by the third disk I installed, so in spite of being lazy and highly averse to writing things down, started a hand-written list.  I note the make, size, model #, and and serial #, then an abbreviation of which controller and connector, then the disk #, then the current physical location.  I use simple locations like F2 (installed in front, second down) and S3 (installed from the side, 3rd down).  I'll be transferring that to a simple text file in a shareable folder, accessible from anywhere, so I can quickly refer to it from any computer.  I wish I had done that for all of my computers.  It's amazing how fast you can get drives mixed up, only days after installing them.

 

As noted by orb and others, stickers work too. I'll bet just about everyone with more than 3 drives has had to come up with a system for locating them.

 

By the way, this should be a warning to anyone with more than a few drives, and no location/identification info recorded in some way.  If/When one of your most important drives suddenly fails, you really don't want to be guessing which physical drive it is.  You want to quickly yank the correct one, and get a replacement drive rebuilding.  Just imagine yanking the wrong one, based on hope or a guess or bad memory, and starting unRAID back up.  Now you have 2 drives out, AND your parity is no longer valid!!!  You CANNOT rebuild the failed drive, and all of its data is lost!  It *might* be possible to recover, with a lot of luck, a backup of the flash drive's Config folder that was just made, some expert help, and absolutely no changes to the array, especially with whatever was happening at the moment of drive failure.  I think that even with the best of help and ideal circumstances, you have little chance of recovering your failed drive (but I could be wrong).  So record that info or label that drive.  Make sure you know exactly which physical drive corresponds to which unRAID drive.

 

Without recorded info, you *can* still pull every drive (with the system down) until you find the right serial #.  Having 'hot-swap' cartridges or slide-out trays would be a huge help, but many or most of us have at least a few or all of our drives that would be a huge pain to uninstall, one by one.

 

Another advantage of drives of different manufacturers and capacities.

 

 

Bill

By the way, this should be a warning to anyone with more than a few drives, and no location/identification info recorded in some way.  If/When one of your most important drives suddenly fails, you really don't want to be guessing which physical drive it is.  You want to quickly yank the correct one, and get a replacement drive rebuilding.  Just imagine yanking the wrong one, based on hope or a guess or bad memory, and starting unRAID back up.  Now you have 2 drives out, AND your parity is no longer valid!!!  You CANNOT rebuild the failed drive, and all of its data is lost!  It *might* be possible to recover, with a lot of luck, a backup of the flash drive's Config folder that was just made, some expert help, and absolutely no changes to the array, especially with whatever was happening at the moment of drive failure.  I think that even with the best of help and ideal circumstances, you have little chance of recovering your failed drive (but I could be wrong).  So record that info or label that drive.  Make sure you know exactly which physical drive corresponds to which unRAID drive.

 

Without recorded info, you *can* still pull every drive (with the system down) until you find the right serial #.  Having 'hot-swap' cartridges or slide-out trays would be a huge help, but many or most of us have at least a few or all of our drives that would be a huge pain to uninstall, one by one.

 

 

This is why I would like to see unraid give this information.  Like I said earlier, Windows will show you the information under Disk Management.  For example, it would display something like HPT302xxxxxx 0,1 to denote a primary slave drive connected to my Highpoint controller.  I don't pretend to know how easy it would be to get unraidd to display that info, but if it's possible to do, I would think that would be a tremendous benefit to users.  As noted above there are many workarounds, but nothing nearly as elegant and handy as the info displayed in the gui.

I agree.  Of course, we assume the cable management is not too bad, so one can quickly find which drive is attached to that controller and port!  I still think that a sticker on a visible drive surface or having recorded physical location info can be helpful, especially with high cable counts or very cluttered case.

 

The best way to approach this is to come up with a labeling scheme for your hard drive slots, naming them Parity, disk1, disk2, and so on.

 

If you are using mobile racks or 3-in-2 cages, etc, this is easy.  Just look at your chassis and decide how you want to label each hard drive tray.  For example, in the MD-1200 we decided parity would be at the top, with disk1 immediately below it, then disk2, disk3, etc.

 

Now it really doesn't matter which controller each hard drive is connected to.  If this is a brand new system, just install a disk in one of your pre-labeled slots, power-up, and look at the Devices page.  Click the drop-down menu for the logical disk you are assigning, and select the disk that shows up - you have now assigned a controller to a logical disk - and this controller designation will not change as you add/remove disks (but note that it might change if you add/remove disk controllers).

 

If you don't want to populate your server one disk at a time, then make a note of each hard drive's serial number and which logical disk slot you plugged it into.  Then power-up, go to Devices, and select each disk by examining the s/n's displayed in the drop-down box.

 

When you add a new disk to an existing array, similarly just go to Device page, select the logical disk slot and assign the disk.

 

The Devices page has been designed explicitly for this purpose.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  It was just a suggestion.  I know there are manual ways to keep this from being a problem.  I was just thinking it would be nice for unraid to include the controller info.  I do love unraid!