14 hours ago, getgray said:

Unraid 7.3.2 with an attached 24 bay SAS enclosure. I had it all configured, my different arrays color coded, my blocks formatted to suit, all good, was very happy, but I was fiddling wit ha detail and somehow the setup got scrambled. Possibly from a lot of previous reconfiguration when I was building the server, dunno. I tried hard to get it all synced up but finally gave up, removed, cleared the old dirs, reinstalled the plugin, and started from scratch. After that and a few weeks of using it w/o issue, I ran into something different...

I have 2 sets of drives I keep "parked" in my enclosure, some are spares, arranged in a specific order, some for specific arrays, and some for backups. All of them are cold-storage and air-gapped (drive tray pulled out in disconnected position). All of these cold drives have their physical location setup and recorded in the tool. Previous to today, it was working great and all of those "cold" drives had their "LED" status light changed to a black square showing they were off. A red square would have been good, but black was fine.

Today, after a reboot all those air-gapped drives now blink red (the whole drive "box" in the dashboard). Maybe by design, but in the few weeks and a hundred reboots before I didn't get that. So my question and maybe a plea is, is there a way to catalog my "cold" drives in their intended location, and let it "stick" without them being removed to history, or if I set to in Tray Allocations, not having them blink red? Again, before I was getting a square black box for "Off-line" which was fine, A red blinking LED would be preferable to the whole box. Or a checkbox to mark as a cold drive maybe?

How can I get back to the square black LED instead of the blazing billboard red blinking?

Hello getgray,

Drives will be automatically removed/moved to history when it's not detected by the system anymore. This happens during boot of the system or during Force SMART+DB. Things might have worked differently in the past, and was most likely a bug that shouldn't work that way. For you it was a feature =D

Adding a possibility to add a cold storage is a good idea, and I will list it up as a feature request. I will have no ETA on when this will be implemented. However, this will require the drive to be added and scanned, then marked as cold storage before it will be removed. If it's already in the history tab, the location of the drive is of course removed as well. It should however be relatively easy to implement (but other things might break .. :p). Technically is all about adding a status letter, but it has to be acknowledged by rest of the plugin.

10 hours ago, FlamongOle said:

Adding a possibility to add a cold storage is a good idea, and I will list it up as a feature request. I will have no ETA on when this will be implemented. However, this will require the drive to be added and scanned, then marked as cold storage before it will be removed. If it's already in the history tab, the location of the drive is of course removed as well. It should however be relatively easy to implement (but other things might break .. :p). Technically is all about adding a status letter, but it has to be acknowledged by rest of the plugin.

Thank you. Appreciate the consideration and add. Fingers crossed re timeline. Thanks for the tool.

Important information!

There's a new plugin emerging from a fork of Disk Location, it's apparently vibe coded from what I can see and it's called "Disk Location Next"

I am not affiliated with that plugin what so ever, and I will request that user to rename the plugin so it won't look like it's affiliated to my work.

You, users, are free to choose whichever direction you want, maybe the new plugin will be better, or even replace this one in the future. I am very happy that someone will provide with an alternative, choices are good.

I will still maintain and continue to build this plugin the way I want for now, without the help of an AI. Call me old fashioned, but I am not vibe coding my plugin for several reasons, the most important is: personal lack of control and that it is very bad for our planet.

Update 2026.10.02

• Commit #524 - FEATURE: Added cold storage option to save information of a drive not attached or online.

• Commit #519 - MINOR: Make the tray map usable on mobile viewports (Thanks to joshmans@github).

• Commit #518 - ENHANCEMENT: Fix pkill quoting, add JSON export, add PHP lint CI, harden shell_exec() calls (Thanks to joshmans@github).

@getgray you can try this update, I have not been able to test this myself other than that it won't destroy anything and that it does store the set values.

To use cold storage:

• attach the drives to your hardware

• do a force smart+db update

• go to Tray Allocations

• assign the drives how you want them

• check "cold" for those that's gonna remain as cold storage

• save

• pull the drives marked as "cold" from the hardware

• test by either force smart+db or reboot.

Cold storage seems to work perfectly. Green, light purple, and pink are all retracted/air-gapped in-place. Thank you very much.

One detail I missed earlier. The update cleared the drive "comment" fields. For both hot and cold drives as shown in my prev replies image. I reset the comment fields, and just double clicking on each line, the last comments (that actually matched the drives or possibly the location of the field) were there to pick so it wasn't hard to do. Once the comments were reset, another force Smart+DB, and even though the cold drives were disconnected, all the comments remained stuck.

Edited October 2Oct 2 by getgray

Posted as a feature request at : https://github.com/olehj/disklocation/issues/527

In my configuration I have Trim serial numbers = 4. Thinking it meant something else. Coincidentally it worked as expected on my Seagates due to a 8 char SN. My WD drives only got their leading "WD-W" leading chars removed, but still give the rest of the serial number, not trimmed to last 4.

Digging in to see why, in array_devices.php I see:

$devices[$hash]["formatted"]["serial"] = ( isset($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"]) ? "" . substr($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"], $serial_trim) . "" : null );

So, from that I understand Trim 4 means "remove the first 4 characters.", not show the last 4, which is what I was originally expecting.

FWIW, I normally chop the serials to their last digits so it's easier to look for the last 4 chars instead of the whole thing. Having a set length would also allow for a consistent length in your Dashboard Formatting's "serial" variable. I've never had a duplicate last 4 on my drives, but if I did I could move to displaying 5 etc. So I'm just throwing it out there for your consideration as an option or a change:

In lieu of or an alternate option for "Trim Serial numbers ____"

"Show last X chars of serial number ___"

Code:

$devices[$hash]["formatted"]["serial"] = ( isset($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"]) ? "" . substr($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"], -$serial_trim) . "" : null );

Thanks, Scott

Edited October 3Oct 3 by getgray

13 hours ago, getgray said:

Posted as a feature request at : https://github.com/olehj/disklocation/issues/527

In my configuration I have Trim serial numbers = 4. Thinking it meant something else. Coincidentally it worked as expected on my Seagates due to a 8 char SN. My WD drives only got their leading "WD-W" leading chars removed, but still give the rest of the serial number, not trimmed to last 4.

Digging in to see why, in array_devices.php I see:

$devices[$hash]["formatted"]["serial"] = ( isset($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"]) ? "" . substr($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"], $serial_trim) . "" : null );

So, from that I understand Trim 4 means "remove the first 4 characters.", not show the last 4, which is what I was originally expecting.

FWIW, I normally chop the serials to their last digits so it's easier to look for the last 4 chars instead of the whole thing. Having a set length would also allow for a consistent length in your Dashboard Formatting's "serial" variable. I've never had a duplicate last 4 on my drives, but if I did I could move to displaying 5 etc. So I'm just throwing it out there for your consideration as an option or a change:

In lieu of or an alternate option for "Trim Serial numbers ____"

"Show last X chars of serial number ___"

Code:

$devices[$hash]["formatted"]["serial"] = ( isset($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"]) ? "" . substr($devices[$hash]["raw"]["serial"], -$serial_trim) . "" : null );

Thanks, Scott

Sample image with my Dashboard formatting:

Use -4 instead of 4, negative numbers allowed

13 hours ago, getgray said:

One detail I missed earlier. The update cleared the drive "comment" fields. For both hot and cold drives as shown in my prev replies image. I reset the comment fields, and just double clicking on each line, the last comments (that actually matched the drives or possibly the location of the field) were there to pick so it wasn't hard to do. Once the comments were reset, another force Smart+DB, and even though the cold drives were disconnected, all the comments remained stuck.

I will check the comment fields later. Thanks for reporting.

4 hours ago, FlamongOle said:

Use -4 instead of 4, negative numbers allowed

Perfect, thank you. Like this tool more and more...

@FlamongOle : Last request for consideration, I love your dashboard with the details and the smaller summary panel for the Unraid dashboard with its hover for details feature, too. The tool is a pleasure to have for a larger chassis. One thing I would like to be able to see "at a glance" is whether or not my drives are spun down. Currently for a spun down drive, I get a blinking LED that alternates black/green. This is with "LED Display" set to unraid or circular (I use the Unraid LED option now). With this LED's blinking behavior, it's harder to tell at-a-glance which drives are spun down, you have to let your eye "hover" on that LED to see if it's gonna blink, then look at next drive of interest and so on. For a spun down drive, I'd like to see a different color there, in lieu of the blinking. This would be similar to what the Unraid Main tab does with a solid gray LED for a spun down drive. I don't care if it blinks or not, if the blinking were a different color pair for that state, so at any moment it's clear that the state of a drive is spun down. Maybe there are explicit reasons for the current LED color/behavior, but in any case, I think a different color for that state would be clearer. Thanks for considering.

18 hours ago, getgray said:

@FlamongOle : Last request for consideration, I love your dashboard with the details and the smaller summary panel for the Unraid dashboard with its hover for details feature, too. The tool is a pleasure to have for a larger chassis. One thing I would like to be able to see "at a glance" is whether or not my drives are spun down. Currently for a spun down drive, I get a blinking LED that alternates black/green. This is with "LED Display" set to unraid or circular (I use the Unraid LED option now). With this LED's blinking behavior, it's harder to tell at-a-glance which drives are spun down, you have to let your eye "hover" on that LED to see if it's gonna blink, then look at next drive of interest and so on. For a spun down drive, I'd like to see a different color there, in lieu of the blinking. This would be similar to what the Unraid Main tab does with a solid gray LED for a spun down drive. I don't care if it blinks or not, if the blinking were a different color pair for that state, so at any moment it's clear that the state of a drive is spun down. Maybe there are explicit reasons for the current LED color/behavior, but in any case, I think a different color for that state would be clearer. Thanks for considering.

Set the LED signals to "Static"

42 minutes ago, FlamongOle said:

Set the LED signals to "Static"

Thanks for that, apologies, I missed that option too. I appreciate that you've put a lot of thought and customization into this.

Initially I thought it would still be a easier to see at a glance if that particular LED was a different color vs black (in spun down static LED mode). But after looking at a mock up, I just needed to adjust my brain to look for what's on instead of what's spun down, which is really what one needs to know, and now easy to see. The full size dashboard might improve a little with gray IMO, but the already-implemented static LED helped the most. Thanks again.

Update 2026.10.12

• Commit #528 - MINOR: zfs_disk() substring match: sda matched to ZFS member sdaa1. Thanks to kapsaicin@github for the fix.