Bay Watch

Formerly Disk Location Next.

Every bay needs a lifeguard. Bay Watch keeps an eye on your drives: a visual map of which physical bay, tray or PCIe slot each one lives in, plus SMART health history over time. No slow-motion running along the array required (though if your drive activity LEDs are blinking in slow motion, that's what the Locate button is for).

It started life as a ground-up rewrite of the Disk Location Unraid plugin concept. This version is a standalone TypeScript/Node.js service that talks to Unraid's native unraid-api GraphQL interface (Unraid 7.2+) and Unraid's own runtime state files, instead of a classic PHP webGUI plugin.

About the name. This project was first called "Disk Location Next", which made it sound like an official next version of Disk Location. It isn't: Bay Watch is an independent project with its own codebase, and it is not affiliated with Disk Location or its author, Ole-Henrik Jakobsen (olehj). He kindly suggested a name that makes the difference clear, so it is now Bay Watch. Credit for the original idea belongs to Disk Location, which is still maintained and well worth using on its own.

Already installed as Disk Location Next? Installing Bay Watch carries over your Unraid API settings, chassis layout, logos and SMART history, and removes the old plugin. See Moving from Disk Location Next.

This is a separate codebase from the Disk Location plugin - no PHP code, files, or history carry over, only the underlying idea and the lessons learned building it. See ROADMAP.md for the full architecture history, every real API gap this project ran into (and how each was worked around), and what's still open.

Features

• Tray/bay drive map. A chassis is modeled as a list of physical groups (a front hot-swap cage, a rear cage, a PCIe carrier card) rather than one flat grid, matching how real hardware is actually laid out. Each bay renders with a directory-discovered tray-skin (classic, an unbranded generic, and unofficial fan-styled recreations of SuperMicro/Dell/HP/NetApp hardware) or, for M.2/U.2 drives, a PCIe carrier shell (default, plus unofficial ASUS/SuperMicro/HPE-style quad-NVMe carriers) - both are plain SVGs you can add to without touching any code.
• Per-bay drive info at a glance: SMART-status LED (color configurable per skin/status), drive-type icon (HDD/SSD/NVMe), array role (parity/data/cache/boot/unassigned - with cache pool name), exact capacity, and make/model - shown as text when there's no logo, or a manufacturer logo when there is. Role coloring and role badges are independent, optional toggles.
• Disk assignment, in bay-position order, with a Locate button (blinks the real drive's activity LED via repeated smartctl queries) on both unassigned and already-assigned drives, so you can sanity-check an assignment without guessing.
• Brand-logo system: a hotlinked URL or a locally-uploaded SVG per detected drive brand (auto-detected from the drive's own vendor/model string, overridable per bay), separate from each tray skin's own chassis-branding logo - a Dell-skinned bay doesn't mean a Dell drive.
• Import from the classic Disk Location plugin, if it's still installed: matches its saved tray assignments to your currently-connected drives by recomputing its own identity hash, and previews the match count before touching anything.
• SMART History tab: temperature, power-on hours, and reallocated/pending/uncorrectable sector trend charts per drive, derived from periodic smartctl polls (a drive in standby is never woken just to sample it).
• Layout sizing controls: per-group and per-card widths, plus an overall app-width setting, so a large chassis isn't squeezed into a fixed layout.
• Daemon control from the Settings tab: start/stop/restart and change the listening port, even when the daemon itself is down - this goes through Unraid's own always-running PHP/nginx layer, not the daemon's own API (which is exactly what's unreachable in that case).

Requirements

• Unraid 7.2 or later (this is the first version to ship unraid-api; there's no lower floor to design around).
• An unraid-api API key with read access to disk/array data. Generate one from Unraid's own Settings > Management Access (or unraid-api apikey on the command line) - see the unraid-api docs for the exact steps on your version.

Installing

Not yet in Community Applications - install by pasting this repo's .plg URL directly into Unraid's Plugins > Install Plugin field:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshmans/unraid-baywatch/main/plugin/unraid-baywatch.plg

A Community Apps entry is planned as a fast-follow once a real tagged release has been installed and verified on a live box (see ROADMAP.md's open questions).

Moving from Disk Location Next

If you installed this plugin under its old name (unraid-disklocation-next), install Bay Watch with the URL above. The installer, once, copies settings.json, layout.json, the SMART-history database and any uploaded logos from /boot/config/plugins/unraid-disklocation-next into /boot/config/plugins/unraid-baywatch, stops the old daemon, and removes the old plugin. It never deletes the old folder, so you can check everything came across and then delete it yourself (it also holds old downloaded packages that can be large). The page is now at Tools > Bay Watch, and its web address changed from /plugins/unraid-disklocation-next/ to /plugins/unraid-baywatch/.

First-run configuration

Open Tools > Bay Watch > Settings > Unraid API connection and enter your GraphQL URL (typically https://localhost/graphql, since the daemon runs on the box itself) and API key. Everything else (chassis layout, disk assignments, skins, brand logos, LED colors, SMART-history retention) is configured entirely from the plugin's own Tools page too - no config files to hand-edit.

Using it

Open Tools > Bay Watch. Five tabs:

• Tray Map - the live, read-only chassis view. Shows "the plugin's service isn't running" with a Start button if the daemon is down, instead of silently falling back to sample data.
• Disk Assignment - assign a detected disk (by serial number, stable across reboots) to an empty bay/module, or Locate one to confirm it physically.
• Drive Identity - the brand-logo URL/upload table and per-bay brand overrides.
• Settings - chassis layout editor (groups, rows/columns, skins, PCIe carriers, sizing), manufacturer/skin logos, per-skin LED colors, role display toggles, SMART-history storage location and retention, daemon start/stop/restart and port, and the classic-plugin import.
• SMART History - trend charts for temperature, power-on hours, and sector health, for any drive unraid-api reports (not just ones you've assigned a bay to yet).

Contributing

Same house rules as the original plugin: one branch per feature, PR'd and merged individually, commit messages explaining why not just what. A tray-skin or PCIe-carrier contribution is just a new SVG pair + meta.json under assets/ - see assets/tray-skins/README.md and assets/pcie-carrier/README.md. Never bundle or redistribute a real trademarked manufacturer logo - logos stay strictly in the user-configured logo/brand system, never shipped with the plugin itself.

See ROADMAP.md for the architecture decisions, every real unraid-api quirk this project found and worked around, and what's still open.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.