CentOS - Sep 2011 - mdadm and drive identification?

I have a server that has 16 drives in it. They are connected to a 3ware
9650SE-16ML SATA RAID card. I have the card set to export all the drives as JBOD
because I prefer Linux to do the reporting of drive and RAID health . I'm
using mdadm to create a RAID6 with a hot spare. Doing this I can take the disks
and put them on a completely different SATA controller/computer and still have
the RAID intact. My problem is that I have no "for sure" way of
matching a drive assigned to one of the /dev/sd[a-z]. Normally I could use a
number of methods to match up what /dev/sd[a-z] is to a drives serial number.
smartctl, hdparm, udevinfo, /dev/disk/by-uuid, or /dev/disk/by-id. However, the
3ware card obfuscates the drives from the OS and those methods don't work.
The only way I know how to get a drives serial number is via the smartctl
command like "smartctl -d 3ware,[0-15] -i /dev/twa0", but that does
not tell me which sd[a-z] the drive is assigned to. Here is what I have tried.

Creating a single large partition with fdisk on each drive as linux autoraid to
get a uuid. for some reason the OS assigns the same uuid and only one uuid to
the last drive I partition from the 3ware card. Basically all drives on the
3ware card have the same uuid..

Using the /dev/disk/by-id/.  For some reason the 3ware card does not always
assign the same id to a drive after a reboot.

Is there another easy way I can positively ID a drive by serial number and the
/dev/sd[a-z] that mdadm sees?

Thanks.
David.

>Is there another easy way I can positively ID a drive by serial number and
the /dev/sd[a-z] that mdadm sees?
I don't know of a tool like tune2fs or *fstune that works for mdraid.
You might try on the mdadm list where Neil Brown hangs out...

Given the wealth of easy ways to manage and monitor the health of
an lsi card, I'd never entertain this on any of my systems that use them...