Two HDDs are switching their device names in Ubuntu Linux

David197705
David197705 used Ask the Experts™
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Hello!

Not like it's a problem so far, but mostly my curiosity. I have 2 disks -- internal and external. The latter is connected via USB3 cable. My Ubuntu install is on the external drive. W10 is inside my laptop (it's a dual-boot system). So usually my internal drive is sda and my external one is sdb in Ubuntu (they're both SATA drives, of course). But today they switched their device names, so the internal became sdb and external became sda. After the reboot everything got back to normal. I personally haven't done anything in this regard. To me that's strange. Maybe someone could explain that to me, please.
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Commented:
That normally makes little difference, as most modern systems and settings use the UUID of the partition rather than the device name. That way you are flexible.

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