Disk Utility shows me three hard drives with the same name. How to find the physical hard drives they refer to

disk-utility

I have to change out the hard drives in Raid 1 array. But all the hard drives have the same name in DiskUtility app because they are all the same type of drives from the same manufacturer.

So how can I find out which drive is failing?

I mean, how can I tell which physical drive is referred to by each DiskUtility drive name?

@Allen, thank you for your interest.
I have a Mac Pro running Mojave that has 4 drive slots. The first slot holds a 1TB Intel Server SSD with the MacOS installed. There are also three 2TB WD 3.5" SATA Drives that were originally configured in a 6TB Raid 5 array.
Disk Util list reveals that the three SATA drives are all the same WD Model number.
One of the SATA Drives in the raid array failed and I took it out of the raid array and mirrored the remaining two drives as a raid 1 array.
Recently, one of the two mirrored drives also 'failed' from the perspective of the raid array.
What I need to do is disconnect both of the 'failed' drives from the raid and copy the data on the remaining SATA drive to an external drive to preserve it and replace the data on a single new SATA Drive, then add two more SATA Drives and re-create a new Raid 5 Array.

So again, my question is: how do I distinguish which physical SATA drive is referred to by the remaining WD drives listed in disk util list is the remaining 'good' drive in the disk util listing that contains my valuable data.

Therefore I believe the question I asked is a proper explanation of the information I am seeking:

how can I tell which physical drive is referred to by each Disk Utility list drive name?

That is, I think the question does not require any information about the drives or their configuration, or their history, or the problems I am having.

Either there is a way for MacOS to tell me which physical drive bay contains which logical drive listed in disk util list, or MacOS has no way of revealing the correspondence between the Logical List of drives in Disk Util and the physical drives attached to the system.

If Mojave cannot tell me which logical drive is which physical drive, then I need to know if there is another utility which will reveal the correspondence.

Does that make sense?
Thanks,
Kimball

Best Answer

You can do this from Terminal with the system_profiler command:

$ system_profiler SPSerialATADataType

It will generate a list of all SATA drives attached to your Mac. You will get an output similar to the following (yours will be longer as you have more drives):

Intel 7 Series Chipset:

  Vendor: Intel
  Product: 7 Series Chipset
  Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
  Negotiated Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
  Physical Interconnect: SATA
  Description: AHCI Version 1.30 Supported

    APPLE SSD SM128E:

      Capacity: 121.33 GB (121,332,826,112 bytes)
      Model: APPLE SSD SM128E                        
      Revision: CXM09A1Q
      Serial Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx      
      Native Command Queuing: Yes
      Queue Depth: 32
      Removable Media: No
      Detachable Drive: No
      BSD Name: disk0
      Medium Type: Solid State
      TRIM Support: Yes
      Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
      S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
      Volumes:
        EFI:
          Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
          BSD Name: disk0s1
          Content: EFI
          Volume UUID: 0E239BC6-F960-3107-89CF-1C97F78BB46B
        disk0s2:
          Capacity: 120.99 GB (120,988,852,224 bytes)
          BSD Name: disk0s2
          Content: Apple_CoreStorage
        Boot OS X:
          Capacity: 134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)
          BSD Name: disk0s3
          Content: Apple_Boot
          Volume UUID: BFD92A4F-346D-3CCD-911F-48D03D8FD8AE

What you’re going to look for is the disk identifier and the serial number of any drive where the SMART status doesn’t say “Verified”

Once you have the serial number, match it with the label on the drive itself

Related Question