Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> writes:
A "*in theory*" that I experienced quite frequently not so long ago, not exactly in the sequence above, but /dev/sda and /dev/sdb frequently interchanged.
I added that caveat because I've never had it trip me up. :-) OTOH I got badly stung under Ubuntu 8.04 where udev would prefer LVM snapshots over snapshot origins for /dev/disk/by-uuid/ symlinks -- so if you rebooted with an LVM snapshot, it would quietly mount the snapshot and keep going. Had an entire apt mirror being maintained in the snapshot... :-/
If UUID are hard to deal with, ie: readability, LABEL may be an alternative. If my memory is right, OpenSUSE uses Labels instead of UUIDs.
+1, this is what I usually do. You can also refer to it by the bus and serial number: $ find /dev/disk -type l -ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/b94873ff-cabe-445a-b0d4-4907bb1d26a7 -> ../../zram0 /dev/disk/by-uuid/c636d1f0-a35e-423c-a7b1-bafe06f6aa58 -> ../../sda /dev/disk/by-label/frey -> ../../sda /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_KINGSTON_SNS415150026B723B05A525 -> ../../sda /dev/disk/by-id/ata-KINGSTON_SNS4151S316G_50026B723B05A525 -> ../../sda