Well, first thing is I got lucky and not bought all the same drives. If I had all the same I would never have known I put my OS on the two drives added with the new sata card, something I DID NOT want to do.
If they were all 1 tb drives, it would have been a disaster to me. Luckily I set up P0-P2 drives with my 500gb and saw the issue immediately.
Below is the issue I am talking about. The system ignores the sda/sdb etc labeling to use UUID and things like hd0, hd1... Yet mdstat shows you the drives in the useless labeling way...sda sdab
--------------------------- lamar owen wrote There seem to be enough differences in the md scheme of 5.x and 6.x to discourage disk interchange among the two in mdraid cases. Having said that, I have an EL6.1 (upstream EL) machine with this: [root at www ~]# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md127 : active raid1 sdae1[0] sdaf1[1] 732570841 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] -----------------------------
taking out a dead drive and adding a new one negates a real ability to re-label them as you want since the new drive would have a different UUID/serial, etc..and screw up any label system you might have done.
That mdstat is not the only monitoring software that pays attention to the 'useless' labels like sda sdb sdc, etc...
and that leads to my fear of not getting accurate reports on problems with drives or partitions...
(in my case I have 8 drives with 2 raid1 arrays made up of 3 drives each, each one having a hot spare....and then a few drives as backups)
I am going to just leave it alone, but I feel their is something missing in the whole theory... if the labels sda, sdb, etc mean nothing to the system admin, then why are they used in monitoring software...and worse, why are they the only drive identification listed in the installer???
And the disk manager, graphical one, in centos 6 does not list the UUID, it calls it 'worldwide ID'.
By forcing the use of UUID it makes monitoring impossible. If your scripts use the UUID, then you must know the UUID and add them manually. If you change out a drive, your script now fails to pick up the new UUID....very annoying.
I am sure it is needed, but I still see UDEV using unchanging labeling (things I would use to add grub on a drive) like 'HD0,HD1, etc.
why even use the labels, just use HD1, HD2 and the UUID and let it be.