OK, I re-read the thread, and noticed where the confusion comes from. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Persistent_block_device_naming https://wiki.archlinu

OK, I re-read the thread, and noticed where the confusion comes from. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Persistent_block_device_naming https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Persistent_block_device... I am talking about UUIDs, that basically any (Linux at least) filesystem has. Those are a bit like filesystem labels, but generated during filesystem creation. Their format makes collisions virtually impossible. LUKS volumes have one, and partitions inside them have a different one too. This is my prefered way of identifying partitions, as they are persistent even when you move them around with lvm, dd, or others. I think that's also the default in many distributions. PARTUUID is also a nice way to identify partitions when you can't rely on a partition UUID for some reason. It works like UUIDs, but instead of being stored inside the partition, that information is part of the GPT (GUID partition table). If you are more interested in the drives than the partition content, by-id makes sense, though I think the use-case is rather narrow :)