uuid is the newer method and better in my opinion in case you ever add disks or move disks around from computer to computer (it just makes it easier to know which disk and partition is which as they don't always appear as the same sda, sdb order.)
Here is a command that you run as root (or sudo) that might help
(it tells you the uuid for the partition /dev/sdb1):
vol_id --uuid /dev/sdb1
And in /etc/fstab I have
# /dev/sdb1 (100GB)
UUID=ace0e658-81d4-43a3-98c7-46ec689f999f /home ext3 defaults 0 2
Finally, you might want to reboot after updating your fstab file to make sure
that the links that list disk partitions by-uuid are all there.
e.g.
ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid
See also:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131
HTH
