This one is a tricky one. If the external enclosure if obfuscating / miss-representing the serial numbers of the indivicual drives then we are in a not compatible hardware realm. Rockstor must absolutely have access to unique serial numbers as they are the only way to tell one drive from another. Enclosures that do this are in a sense broken by design.
Hope may be had if the enclosure has some settings via firmware or dip switches that can change this broken behaviour. They are in a very real sense trying to present all drives as one by mashing / re-writing their serial numbers into one. We have seen this before and have added a number of exclusions as a result to avoid the poor user experience.
Can you give us details of this enclosure and let us know if you can find any work-arounds via settings etc on or in the device?
These are the exceptions we have to date:
With the last update of this against this issue:
linking to the original issue:
and the changes were in pull request:
Details here as we may need to do the same for your enclosure. Not this simple indicates the enclosure as non usable, it doesn’t allow for it’s use as it’s essentially miss-representing the hardware. We need to see the individual drives for things to make sense. And we track them via their serial numbers.
The following technical wiki entry explains this in more detail and is aimed at developers really but my be of interest as to why we take this stance:
So thanks for the report and do let us know what device you are seeing this on and if you manage to ‘fix’ this behaviour via hardware configuration or what-ever. There is a chance that a custom udev rule could assign serials but would be they according to drive, or drive slot. This must be understood and this enclouse may obfoscate other elements of it’s hardware. All a little tricky.
Hope that helps at least from a perspective point of view.