ZFS add comments to devices

Z

zader

is there a way to identify drives better than just pool/device .. maybe add notes that translate when you do a "zpool status" command.. or descriptions / comments to the device label .. like ada0=bay12... I'm just wondering what the best way to label devices so you correctly identify failed devices in large pools..

thanks
 
I use gpart labels to give symbolic names to the partitions; those then show up in the output of zpool. In my case, I put a big physical paper labels on the disk drive itself, with a brief name (like hd16 for the hard disk I bought in 2016), and those match the partition label (like hd16_home is the partition that is in the home pool, hd16_backup the one in the backup pool, and so on).

Identifying the physical location of disks, in particular in a complex system with external disk enclosures and SAS expanders, is a difficult art. For small amateur systems, just being consistent in naming them solves the problem quite easily.
 
thanks for the idea Ill look into that.. my naming schema falls in the extensive/pita category.. ideally baking it into deployment would be the best so perhaps a simple label will do the trick
 
looks like i missed an article

forums.freebsd.org

Labeling partitions done right on modern computers.

If you have ever added or removed a disk from your computer running FreeBSD, you have probably experienced that device names had moved around after a reboot and FreeBSD wouldn't boot anymore or a ZFS pool failed. Labels can work around that. Before we start, it’s important to know that there...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
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