Identify a Harddisk - LED Blinking

[diamondave]

Dear all

I have a storage with 8 Disks and want to be shure to replace the right disk in the case of a failure. The harddisks are connected directly to the board (no RAID-Controller between Mainboard and Server), I have a ZFS Storage called "pool1". Is it possible to let the LED Blinking for a while so that I can identify the failed Disk?

Thanks for any answers, Dave

[Onichan]

I'm not sure a good way to keep a drive blinking, but if the drive has some functionality then you could either try using dd to /dev/[ada#|da#] to directly write to the bad drive, which would cause the activity light to stay busy. Also could use camcontrol to force the bad drive to sleep, which should cause the activity light to blink once for a quarter of a second or so, but if you're paying attention you should notice it.

[c71clark]

I think I proactively learned this lesson by browsing this site: Physically label your drives as you put them in, one at a time, starting N4F after each drive is in so you can then Label in N4F it for future identification. Whatever you do to solve your current problem, I would suggest you do this now to save yourself more grief in the future.

[diamondave]

Yes shure, I labeled the disk drives with the results of zpool status. But I like a double net

Thanks for the Hints!

[b0ssman]

instead of writing to the drive with dd you can get the same result by reading from the drive without destroying the data.

if you have a sgpio backplane you can do more advanced stuff to identify your drive.
see
http://people.freebsd.org/~mav/Enclosur ... ent_en.pdf