Also note, if you're using an SAS HBA: the LSI 1068E-R based HBAs, when flashed with IT firmware, have a persistent drive mapping setting. When it is active, it

Also note, if you're using an SAS HBA: the LSI 1068E-R based HBAs, when flashed with IT firmware, have a persistent drive mapping setting. When it is active, it will always give a specific physical disk the same device name, even if it gets moved to a different physical port. Let's say you a drive with serial number ABC123 on port 0 as c4t0d0 and serial number XYZ987 on port 1 as c4t1d0. You could swap the two drives and ABC123 would still be c4t0d0 and XYZ987 would still be c4t1d0. If all ports on the controller were in use, and you yanked c4t7d0 and slid in a new drive, it would become c4t8d0 (unless you used lsiutil to remove the persistent mapping). Other HBAs may have similar features.