Drives on Zimablade reporting same serial number even though they are different

TrueNAS General
1

I have installed TrueNAS Community on the Zimablade but when I go to build the pool I get the error that the drives have the same serial number…but they do not.

The drives are two 5TB Toshiba 3.5 inch SATA drives. They are connected to the Zimaboard’s SATA ports using the Y-cable (for power) provided by Zima. My intention is just to create a simple two drive mirror.

After lots of googling and some help from Gemini I executed a bunch of serial commands in TrueNAS shell (for example lsblk, udevadm, disk.query, and raw hexdump of vpd_pg80). All of these commands show different values for the two drives.

Here’s the lsblk output as an example:

truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,SERIAL
NAME SIZE MODEL SERIAL
sda 4.5T TOSHIBA HDWE150 17DAKAL7F57D
sdb 4.5T TOSHIBA HDWE150 17C7KE22F57D
mmcblk0 29.1G 0x378ebcb0
mmcblk0boot0 4M
mmcblk0boot1 4M

If the shell commands see different serial numbers why does the Pool UI think they are the same?

What is the fix for this?

Gemini was suggesting some kind of custom UDEV rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ but I have no idea if this is the right approach or really how to do it (and to be honest Gemini didn’t really seem to know either).

Any help would be appreciated.

2

One more tidbit. I just discovered the “Disks” Tab in the Console. This show different IDs!!!

Now I really don’t understand why the Pool creation wizard complains.

3

Try removing one of the Toshiba drives and attempt to create a pool. Do you still have the error with a single Toshiba? These errors are usually associated with USB attached drives or expansion shelves that are know to cause issues. If you can create a single drive pool, you can try to add the second drive afterwards to create a mirror VDEV

What version of TrueNAS are you running?

4

Thanks for getting back.

I’m on 25.10.7 which I believe is current.

I’m off to try the “one drive” test.

5

I have a feeling it is seeing the MMC storage & bitching about that.

You could run a smartctl -a /dev/sda and smartctl -a /dev/sdb to confirm the drives have two different SNs reported.

lspci output may be of use because I’m curious on what they use as the sata controller on these boards.

6

You are exactly correct!

When trying with one drive I still got the Pool warning. So obviously the two drives it was complaining about were not the two hard drives.

So I reattached the second drive proceeded despite the warning and it proceeded to create the pool.

Now I feel a bit silly but maybe the message could have bee clearer and said what drives have the same ID.

In any event, I learned a lot as they say.

Thanks for the help.

7

Yeah it don’t love the MMC - I’m not sure if you’re using it for the boot pool, but I’d consider getting a usb to sata/nvme ssd adapter for the boot pool (this is specific to your use case, otherwise I don’t love using USB anything near TrueNAS).

I don’t know how long the MMC will last as a boot drive for TrueNAS as there is a steady amount of writes (I’ve had 1 cheapo ssd go to 8% life remaining after about 3-4 years of 24/7 use before I swapped it out). This’d give you a way to swap it out without having the built-in storage on your ZimaBlade being ground down to notice (I don’t know if it would still boot if that happened? Either that or hope you’re good with a hot air station).

Download/back up the TrueNAS config file periodically in case you ever have boot pool issues.