Hey folks,

 

I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question, but I haven't used *nix in over a decade and I'm very rusty. 

 

I just built my first unRAID box and am in the process of preclearing the first two drives.  They are assigned sdb and sdc.  I assumed the first would be sda, but my flash drive appears to take that designation (well, "sda1" to be exact).  Is this normal?  Perhaps a product of my Asus board (the flash drive had to be set under hard disks in the BIOS in order to boot from it)?

 

Another curious question I have is related to the  Supermicro SASLP-MV8.  It's plugged in, but no drives attached since the breakout cable shipping was delayed.  Would its 8 ports only be available if drives are attached?  All 6 SATA channels on my mobo is reported even though only 2 drives are attached, but none of the Supermicro are listed when I evoked "dmesg|grep SATA|grep link"...

 

Thanks in advance for any insight!  Really looking forward to getting this up and running, buying my Pro license, and transferring over all my media from the Drobo I can't wait to retire.

I assumed the first would be sda, but my flash drive appears to take that designation (well, "sda1" to be exact).  Is this normal?

Yes

Another curious question I have is related to the  Supermicro SASLP-MV8.  It's plugged in, but no drives attached since the breakout cable shipping was delayed.  Would its 8 ports only be available if drives are attached?  All 6 SATA channels on my mobo is reported even though only 2 drives are attached, but none of the Supermicro are listed when I evoked "dmesg|grep SATA|grep link"..

 

The two I installed did not show thier ports until HDD's were attached as the ports are initialised during the boot. If no drives are present nothing loads.

 

Hey folks,

 

I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question, but I haven't used *nix in over a decade and I'm very rusty. 

 

I just built my first unRAID box and am in the process of preclearing the first two drives.  They are assigned sdb and sdc.  I assumed the first would be sda, but my flash drive appears to take that designation (well, "sda1" to be exact).  Is this normal?  Perhaps a product of my Asus board (the flash drive had to be set under hard disks in the BIOS in order to boot from it)?

Not only is it normal, it is possible for the devices to have a completely different device name the next time you reboot, since the device names are assigned as the devices present themselves to the OS. (If one drive is slower in initializing it might have a different designation next time. ) As you add hardware, the device designations can also change.  For that reason under the hood unRAID uses the pci-device/port designation not the /dev/sdX designation to track your assigned disks.

Another curious question I have is related to the  Supermicro SASLP-MV8.  It's plugged in, but no drives attached since the breakout cable shipping was delayed.  Would its 8 ports only be available if drives are attached?  All 6 SATA channels on my mobo is reported even though only 2 drives are attached, but none of the Supermicro are listed when I evoked "dmesg|grep SATA|grep link"...

Yes, you'll only see those devices once you connect the cables to the disks.

Thanks in advance for any insight!  Really looking forward to getting this up and running, buying my Pro license, and transferring over all my media from the Drobo I can't wait to retire.

Have fun.   It is not really all that difficult.   Don't worry if a disk is /dev/sda now, and changes to /dev/sdf later when you add more disks.  (And as you said the first partition on any given disk is sda1, sdb1 etc... so partitioned disks will have the extra device designation for their raw devices.  unRAID uses those and you then use the "md" devices.  Those are /dev/md1 = disk1, /dev/md2 = disk2, /dev/md3 = disk3, etc...

Thanks to the both of you for your help.  I haven't had a project like this in a while and I'm definitely enjoying it so far!