Quoting Carl Turney ([email protected]):

> Hadn't ever experienced sda and sdb changing assignments in my system -- 
> except one period years ago when the pin contacts on my IDE/PATA caddies 
> got a bit wonky.

Nor I.

I am guessing that the 'sda and sdb changing assignments' occurs in one 
of a couple of scenarios:

1.  At the time of adding or removing drives from an otherwise stable
set of fixed main-storage drive devices.

2.  When leaving USB-connected drives connected through reboots.

USB-connectable drives are handy, but IMO are completely unsuitable for
use as main storage.  E.g., I attach and detach a USB-connectable
external 2TB drive to my server at home, to archive filesets.  When done
each time, I detach the drive and store it at the far end of my lot, so
if the house burns down, the fire can't burn my archive file copies.

So, the USB drive is always /dev/sdd, the next drive up from my three
SCSI hard drives.  Because it's not present during booting, it cannot
even in theory grab /dev/sda away from the SCSI ID0 drive.

That scenario aside, yeah, if you decide to kludge in a new PATA, or
SAS, or SATA, or old-SCSI drive to your existing chains -- or remove 
one of the drives, your /dev/sdX may shuffle a bit in a fairly
predictable way that is essentially a one-time shift.  At which time,
you make the very obvious adjustment to /etc/fstab, and you're done.

To put that another way, adjusting /etc/fstab is just the price of
adding or removing physical drives from your main storage.  You need to
do that even if using UUIDs; all using /dev/sdX adds is the possibility 
you might need to edit some existing entries on the same one-time basis,
too.

Also, I know what /dev/sda _is_.  Yay, clarity.

So, on my system, those UUID lines get banished to ghastly comment lines
way at the bottom of /etc/fstab and never used - the replacement lines 
using /dev/sdX instead.

I reserve the right to change my mind if, say, I use Thunderbolt or
Firewire devices as main storage and their /dev/sdX names keep changing.
In my present use scenario, UUIDs are an ugly solution to a non-existent
problem.

Your Mileage May Differ.[tm]

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