[CentOS] usb drives & Orico ORICO 9548U3-BK

Everyone,

Is there a way to manually assign usb drives to a specified device
label.  Is there a way to force two usb drives to be labeled as
/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd?


I decided to build an archive server for the purpose of backing up
other fedora/centos desktops at the office.  I built a machine and have
installed Centos 7.3 on it with all updates current.  I also purchased
a 3.0 usb sata drive cabinet (Orico ORICO 9548U3-BK) and installed two
5T black WD drives.   There was no problem installing the usb cabinet
or the drives.  I formatted each drive with xfs as /dev/sdc and
/dev/sdd, and then combined them into a software mirrored raid with
mdadm as /dev/md0.

Everything was working perfectly until I removed the terminal, keyboard
and mouse and tried to reboot the machine.  It took a while to figure
out, but when the mouse and keyboard were removed the boot process
assigns the usb drives differently which makes /dev/md0 created by
mdadm fail.

My fstab file looks like :

/dev/mapper/centos_poar-root              /        xfs    defaults  0 0
UUID=f915a354-28bf-4110-bec9-3767ef1fe52c /boot    xfs    defaults  0 0
/dev/mapper/centos_poar-home              /home    xfs     defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/centos_poar-u                 /u       xfs     defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/centos_poar-swap              swap     swap    defaults 0 0
/dev/sda                                  /u0      btrfs   defaults 0 0
# entries below were combined into one mirrored raid system
#/dev/sdc                                /u1      xfs     defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdd                                /u2      xfs     defaults 0 0
/dev/md0                                 /u1      xfs     defaults 0 0


This works perfectly when a usb mouse and a usb keyboard are attached,
but when I remove the mouse and keyboard the system will not boot
because the usb drives are relabeled as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

The only way I have been able to make this archive server function is
to keep a mouse and keyboard plugged in to the system, and even with
the keyboard and mouse attached I can not do a software reboot, I am
required to turn off the power supply for a couple of seconds and then
turn it back on before I hit the power switch on the computer.  I have
played with the bios setting until my eyes are blurry, but have not
been able to solve the problem.  I am using  a ASUS H110M-E/M.2 LGA
1151 Intel H110 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Motherboard.

My thought is that if I could force the usb drives to be labeled as
/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd whether the mouse and keyboard are attached or
not, I might be able to fix the problem

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for your responses!!!!

Greg Ennis