sata and changing devices

Gerry Reno greno at verizon.net
Fri May 23 20:24:01 UTC 2008


Alan Cox wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 01:41:32PM -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
>   
>> So I need to find out if there is some best practice guide for how to 
>> rewrite our tools so that they can support SATA.  We use LVM over RAID 
>> on all our drives and all our RAID and LVM tools appear to still work.  
>> It is only when dealing with the low-level disk devices themselves that 
>> we have problems.  Can someone give me some suggestions as to how to 
>> manage things when using SATA?
>>     
>
> You want to look at the volume itself. SATA is hotplug so talking about
> devices by their bus location is a bit meaningless.
>
> You've got two useful identifiers
>
> 1.	The serial number of the drive available directly either by using
> SG_IO to issue an IDENTIFY or the boot one (which is fine) via ioctls too.
> Or you can script parsing hdparm of course.
>
> 2.	Labels on the file systems which is what RAID/LVM/etc all use.
>
> For low level work where you want to know "this physical disk is the one
> I saw last week" the disk vendor|model|serial combination should be unique
> for any modern real world drive.
>
>   
The serial number might be ok until you replace the disk. Just have to 
remember to rerun the tools for the replacement and to note the 
replacement lineage. In scripts I think I could parse smartctl output 
for serial numbers or is there something better under /proc I can parse?


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