Mounting hard drives absolutely

I had a problem that was nagging me for a while now so I fixed it today. My drives were not getting mounted properly since I got a new one and in Windows you are pretty much screwed when you add drives as they will come up as "C" "D" and you can reassign, but if you fiddle, it gets messy.

In Linux you can mount by UUID /etc/fstab. Here is a link http://www.go2linux.org/man-hdparm. My basic warning though, these need to be done as "root" and so they can do some damage too. Typing something at random will likely do some harm. As always, backup early, backup now!

#1 <file system>
/ dev / sda1       OR
UUID=fece5b0b-dead-beef-cake-012345678901
#2  <mount point>        / mnt / <NAME>
#3     <type>            auto           # auto detect file system type

#4       <options>       user,nouser    # Comma separated list
#atime
#auto,noauto
#ro,rw
#suid,nosuid
#dev,nodev
#exec,noexec
#sync,async

#5             <dump>     0
#6                <pass>  0

UUIDs can be found by "ls -lA /dev/disk/by-uuid"

"man hdparm"
"hdparm -l </dev/sd?>"
"sfdisk -l" shows all partitions and their sizes
"hdparm -t" does timing if you are wondering.
What is kind of sucky is that I have a SATA and it is about 10% faster ( in practice ) than my other drives and it was 2x expensive. My external fire wire drive is about 30% of the other drives but I knew that.