When plugging in a USB stick or USB hard drive no /dev/sdX node was being created. lsusb and dmesg showed that the device was detected yet still no node. It turns our for me that for some reason the modules usb-storage and uas were not being loaded.
modprobe usb-storage modprobe uas |
Running the above commands as root resolved my problems and now the /dev/sdX nodes are being properly created. To make this change permanent add these modules to /etc/rc.conf.