I have a Mediasonic 4 bay USB drive enclosure plugged into a FreeNAS system as a backup. This enclosure randomizes hardware ID information which  confuses FreeNAS. The main symptom of this is the error message about multipath not being optimal.

The way to fix this is to drop to a command line and destroy the mistaken multipath configuration (thanks to this site for the information)

For Freenas 9.x:

gmultipath destroy disk1 disk2 disk3
reboot

For FreeNAS Corral it’s a bit different. You have to brute force remove the kernel module for multipath (thanks to this site for the explanation)

mv /boot/kernel/geom_multipath.ko /boot/kernel/geom_multipath.ko.old

Keep in mind that you may have to do this after each update.

An additional problem is that for some reason GUI doesn’t see the drives but the OS does. If you want smart checking on those other drives you have to do a bit of hackery by creating a SMART job for the visible drives, then manually dropping into a shell to add the invisible ones. Below are my notes for when I did this (I’m not sure these changes survive a reboot)

sudo vi /etc/local/smartd.conf

/dev/da2 -a -n never -W 0,0,0 -m root -M exec /usr/local/www/freenasUI/tools/sma
 rt_alert.py -s S/(01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11|12)/../(1|2|3|4|5|6|7)/(00)

ps aux|grep smartd

kill -9 (pidof smartd)

sudo /usr/local/sbin/smartd -i 1800 -c /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf -p /var/run/smartd.pid