USB hard drives

[Michael Scully]

Greetings:

 

               I have been making use of USB hard drives for the last few
years, instead of tape drives, for removable storage kept off site.  When
you plug one in, Linux sees them as a /dev/sdX raw hard drive, and I can
partition them and format them for ext3 filesystems.  This works well.

 

               However, when you introduce multiple drives on the same
system, there seems to be no way to fix which device node the kernel will
see it as.  It's more first come, first serve.  The first one attached is
/dev/sdb (the main system hard drive array is /dev/sda), and an additional
one is /dev/sdc, etc., etc.

 

               My problem is that when reboot remotely, I may now see this
in a different order than before.  If two drives are attached to the USB
controller, Linux assigns them in an order I can't control.  Since my backup
scripts are doing different things to different drives (one is a small
self-powered portable to off-site, one is a terabyte beast that does small
data snapshots nightly), I'm potentially hitting the wrong devices if the
machine gets rebooted.

 

               Is there any way to control this device assignment order?
I'm not talking about the mount points, but the actual /dev node itself.

 

Scully