Blog O’ Matty

Locating physical disk drives in Solaris

On “enterprise” Sun hardware, you can do nifty tricks like blink LED lights on disks to identify where logical disk names like c8t2d0 resides as Matty pointed out in the blog post here.

But what if you’re stuck on crufty (cheaper) regular SATA drives without the sexy LED support? How do you find c8t2d0 amongst a ton of other disks? Using cfgadm -alv, you can print out the serial number of the drive. The serial number of the drive is usually printed on the external area that is viable (hopefully) or on top of the disk itself. Then, you can go SN hunting amongst all the other disk in your array. Niiice!

$ cfgadm -alv
Ap_Id                          Receptacle   Occupant     Condition  Information
When         Type         Busy     Phys_Id
sata1/0::dsk/c8t0d0            connected    configured   ok         Mod: WDC WD800JD-75HKA1 FRev: 14.03G14 SN: WD-WMAJ95141282
unavailable  disk         n        /devices/pci@0,0/pci108e,534a@7:0
sata1/1::dsk/c8t1d0            connected    configured   ok         Mod: ST31000528AS FRev: CC37 SN: 9VP21P37
unavailable  disk         n        /devices/pci@0,0/pci108e,534a@7:1
sata2/0::dsk/c3t0d0            connected    configured   ok         Mod: WDC WD10EARS-00Z5B1 FRev: 80.00A80 SN: WD-WMAVU1311029
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Update: iostat -En also shows this serial number info as well. I often use iostat -En to check for transport errors and it didn’t dawn on me to look for SN info here. Thanks Mark!

$ iostat -En
c8t0d0           Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: ATA      Product: WDC WD800JD-75HK Revision: 3G14 Serial No:
Size: 80.00GB
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 9 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0
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