How to map a sata device name to a physical sata interface for RAID systems

I have a system with 10 SATA ports, and another SATA as the boot disk. The 10 SATA ports make up 5 software RAID1 drives. The RAID disks may be removed between boots, and swapped in with arbitrary blank disks at any time.

I need to ensure that /dev/sda is always my first physical SATA port, and /dev/sdj is always the tenth for the RAID1 pairs to properly operate. If for example the first disk in the first port fails, that should be a marked as missing disk and so the disk in the next port should be /dev/sdb. Currently, the next available disk is mounted as /dev/sda - completely destroying my arrays - and my boot configuration.

Imagine a horrible scenario where every other disk fails, so each RAID1 array only has 1 disk. The numbering should be:

/dev/sda /dev/sdc /dev/sde /dev/sdg /dev/sdi

NOT:

/dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

I have seen udev rules for labelling specific disks, but since I will be hotswapping disks arbitrarily this is not convenient at all.

• How can I map a device to a specific hardware interface? Is this even possible?


• Is it possible to have a "missing" device on boot, so subsequent devices do not get labelled incorrectly ?