On Thu, 8 Jul 2010, Janek Kozicki wrote:

could you make some trial and error tests, while staying safe?

turn off the array. Shut down. Unplug sdj, boot up. See if it is sdj
that disappeared, but do not assemble the array (so that it won't get
corrupted).

I used smartctl to check that sdj indeed had bad sectors and just failed 
it from the array and then lit it up by dd:ing from it, checked what drive 
it was, and replaced it. When I unplugged it and put in another drive it 
was indeed ata14.

I never really had a huge problem figuring out with high probability which 
drive it was, but I wanted to know if there was a 100% certain way of 
doing it. Seems there is not, am I the only one who is looking for this 
functionality? I would think this is a fairly common problem?

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se