Naming My Disk Drives
I recently bought four new disk drives. Two are USB HDDs for use with the server I'm running on an old MacBook Pro, one is a new SSD specifically for loading Baldur's Gate 3 in under 15 minutes (although I anticipate using it for more), and one is a large-ish new HDD for internal mounting in my PC, because I need more storage.
Setting these up has been really difficult because: I don't know what to name them. I don't have a naming scheme for my drives. In the past, I had 1 HDD and 1 SSD in a single computer any any given time. These would obviously be named Hard Style and Solid Snake. However, such names make no sense when I've introduced more drives. Also, I actually had a second HDD installed for a while which I just named "Old SeaGate" because it didn't fit in my scheme and that was good enough. But that wasn't good enough.
I've been thinking about naming schemes for machines lately too, and I'll write about that separately soon. But my naming scheme for machines (plants) doesn't really extend to disk drives. So I took a bit of time to consider options for a new scheme for disk drives. Some of my initial thoughts:
Norse Runes. I've always had a fascination with ancient Norse culture and so this seemed fitting, but then I had to consider... which alphabet to use? Do I use different alphabets for HDD and SDD names? No, because they share many rune names. Then how do I distinguish between the two? Also, do I use special characters for accuracy or replace them with regular Latin letters?
Greek gods. I studied Classics, I love thinking about Greek mythology, and even better, there are some obvious binary divisions to use for SSD and HDD names: Male and female gods, or Greek and Roman names, or Olympians and others. However, all of these came with issues of hierarchy. The gods have very specific relationships with each other and I don't really want to have that nagging at me, because the disk drives don't have much of a relationship with each other. (Avoidable, I suppose, if I only used lesser gods or even the names of types of lesser gods.)
Then I thought about Norse gods. They lived in separate(ish) tribes: the Aesir and the Vanir. Could I take names from these 2 tribes for each type of drive? Wait - this has all the same problems as above. Getting ahead of myself.
Strictly functional names. This could be some combination of type, manufacturer, size, and UUID. However, I really prefer to think in terms of "aesthetic" names over "identifier" names, and it would be fun to have them. This will not spark joy for me, and therefore I would probably end up abandoning it in the future (despite being perhaps the most scalable option; it's boring and uncompelling).
I then saw a link, provided without comment, to https://namingschemes.com. This must be a damn good site, I thought to myself. It will help me decide.
Unfortunately, I really can't say that's true. The site has a lot of lists, which is nice if you can't think of a list to use, but almost nothing else. There's no philosophy of how to assign names from a list, which is the actual difficult part!
Ok, so now I'm kind of back to square one. I have no good reason to pick one list over another, and if I do, I don't have any compelling division between SSD and HDD. Why does she need this?, you might keep asking. I have always loved the elegance of names that encode useful information - a mix of aesthetic and functional. I don't actually know if there's a term for this specifically. There is a similar idea in literature of a name that tells you who a character is or what they're like (or I guess how the author wants you to judge them perhaps), and people do this in real life in a few ways - most given names are derived from some combination of nouns and adjectives to evoke an expectation of the person and/or their place in the social order. But I don't believe this is the same as what I'm endorsing, which is a good-sounding name (i.e. doesn't sound like a functional label) that tells you something specific and immediately useful, such as storage capacity, or architecture. But also it is different from steganography which has the purpose of secrecy; instead it might be obscure but not necessarily or intentionally unnoticeable to an outsider, nor valuable to hide. I don't know what to call it besides semantic naming - if you know, please find a way to contact me and inform me.
Anyway I gave up on that idea, actually. See, what I would really want to encode is not only the architecture but also the size, or at least relative size, and that's just too much to work into a naming scheme. So, here's what I ended up with.
I decided to give each disk drive the name of an element, chosen arbitrarily, because while chemical elements can be divided into various classification schemes, potentially even binary ones, I think it's also pretty fair to say the each chemical element is unique, and they're all just little guys with their own properties. There don't have to be any particular relationships between them, plus very few of them have any deeply embedded cultural significance (like gold or silver - I won't use those!), so they can be thought of more or less as just a collection of properties rather than a specific thing. Oh - so did I give up on encoding any useful information? Not quite. I also prefix the name with abbreviated info about the drive, so the scheme is:
{H|S}-{n} {e}, where n is the number of TB, e is the element name (capitalized because it looks clean as hell), and the first part is either H for HDD or S for SSD.
So for example, the old SeaGate HDD became H-1 Seaborgium (I couldn't resist), and it's mounted at /mnt/Seaborgium. My primary HDD is H-4 Rhodium, because I just like how it sounds and no other reason.
I'm immediately quite happy with this scheme. It lets me create enjoyable names that spark joy, but perhaps more importantly, it prevents me from getting too attached to a name. Another scheme might make me feel that one drive or another was very important, when I don't need that kind of emotional attachment to a machine that might fail any day and should always be backed up. And it's scalable: I have, more or less, once and for all solved the question of "how do I pick a name for this new drive" with a consistent scheme instead of ad-hoc names.
EDIT: Right after I posted this, I realized I could have just used 2 different lists for SSDs and HDDs - maybe a list of fast things and a list of large things. Damn, that would actually be pretty good. Rivers and Mountains. Comets and Moons. Birds and Whales. I don't know. Feel free to use this insight as inspiration for your own naming scheme because I'm starting to think it's at least as good as the one I'm using.