[SLL] /dev/sd names not in motherboard order

[Andrew Sweger]

On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Derek Simkowiak wrote:

>     I would really like to understand how the device names (/dev/sda, 
> etc.) are discovered and assigned by Linux.  When one of the drives in 
> my 6-disk RAID box fails, I'll need to sit there, unplugging drives one 
> by one from the motherboard to see which drive corresponds to the broken 
> one.  (That's the one major disadvantage of Linux software RAID that 
> I've found... hardware RAID gives you nifty blinkenlights on 
> hot-swappable drives.)

If the drives are not too old and are clearly (physically) labeled with
the manufacturer's serial number, could one not simply:

hdparm -I /dev/$FAILED_DRIVE | grep 'Serial Number'

Seems to work okay for SATA drives. I'm not sure if it'll work with SCSI,
maybe somehow using scsi_id?

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.