I just got a new hdd (supposed to be nice and fast, the new WD FZEX model), 1TB.

My current setup is like this:

sda Slackware 14.1 on 160GB hdd of maybe 4 years of age. Just barely noisy but still halfway decent, running exactly how I like it.

sdb is a little older than sda, noisy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and is unpartitioned and not being used atm. Thinking of using as storage perhaps(?).

1) Is there an easy way to put the new hdd in as sda, and make the current sda into sdb and the current sdb into an sdc?

2) Is there some kind of setup with three hdd's that folks would recommend to use them in a practical way, like some kind of RAID or something?

I don't see it being practical to clone my /home partition to the new hdd as it uses only 123GB on the current sda and would be wasted on the new hdd...unless I'm missing some way of making that work for me.

I guess for the most part, just looking for some possible answers to #1, and some suggestions for simply using all three in some way. I mainly do a *lot* of music ripping and saving to my hdd's because then I don't have to piddle with the CD swapping all the time or having to borrow the CD again to listen to it. At present I've got about 4GB of music (I always rip to ogg format when possible and use pacpl to change non-free formats to ogg) and it's constantly growing. I also rip movies for similar reasons and those tend to use up space a good deal faster, even if I do tend to average the rips to <1GB each...but with 360+ movies all burnt to Bluray discs (which hold 25GB each), it'd still be faster and easier (no startup wait for the dvd drive or digging through all the numbered BD's looking for the movie I want to watch) to watch a movie if I could store them on a hdd.

Not sure what you're asking.
1) Why does it matter what the disks are called ?. Stick in the new drive and see what happens - the first drive the BIOS presents to the OS will (generally) wind up as /dev/sda. Depending on how your fstab is setup, your current system may continue to boot - or not.
If you plan on cloning your system to the new disk (implied, not stated above), simply change the boot order after having done so, and the new drive will likely be /dev/sda. Re-build your bootloader on the new disk. If you leave /home on the original disk fstab will need updating to reflect that.

2) setting up RAID will erase current content - but can be built on partitions rather than full devices, so you can set that up later if you wish once you've re-arranged things. Not sure I'd bother - and you still need backups of important stuff regardless.

Short answer: Forget it. Whether it is sda or sdb makes no difference.

Long answer: Keeping the order might be possible but that depends on many details such as interface type (IDE/SATA/SCSI), disk start up time, and the firmware of motherboard.

Greetz
If I understand what you're asking.....

Old style IDE interface will assign /dev/hda or /dev/sda (depending on kernel) to Primary Master, "b" to Primary Slave, "C" to Secondary Master and so on. The only change to this was a certain few BIOSes with a "Boot Order" selection.

On newer systems with SCSI based drive controllers like SAS and SATA, while which one is marked A0 may default to "/dev/sda" this is actually meant to be overridden by Boot Order, whether BIOS driven or UEFI driven.

Example - Regardless of which arbitrary controller port the drives are connected to, Linux will see the first HARD drive as /dev/sda. So, for illustration's sake, let's say you have a Seagate 1TB SATA drive on one controller port and a WesternDigital 2TB drive on another. For Linux Distro "A" you select the Seagate 1TB as first in Boot Order within the settings in BIOS or UEFI. It will see itself as "/dev/sdax" the x being the number of the partition on that drive.

Then, without changing the "permanent" Boot Order setting in BIOS/UEFI, for the next install you hit F6, F11, (or whatever your mobo has for Boot Order override) and select the Western Digital as first boot. This install will ALSO see itself as "/dev/sdax" with "x" being whatever partition number you have installed to there.

Now, as the system will default to the "permanent" Boot Order, the Seagate will be the default "/dev/sda" and will boot that system and NOT the WesternDigital, which will become "/dev/sdb" to that system. Activating with the F6/F11 whatever will boot the second system on the WD 2TB drive and the Seagate will be seen as "/dev/sdb" to it FOR THAT SESSION, and any done in that manner.

Upon reboot it will default back to the Seagate 1TB as first boot, therefore "/dev/sda", with the WD being back to "/dev/sdb".

This can be either creatively used or terribly confusing which is why some resort to LABEL or UUID as opposed to "/dev" in fstab. Bottom Line - ever since old IDE interface we as users have had easier control of how drives are seen and labelled.

So why change it?

You may be able to plug it in and it will just work that way. You may have to do some BIOS tweaks to get it to work that way. You may have to become familiar with GRUB and UUID. (You should learn about UUID, anyway)

Not really with your configuration. If are looking to learn RAID there are better ways to do so. But for what you have, I think it would be more trouble what it's worth.

If it were my system... I would leave the 160GB drive as is. I would partition out the new 1GB drive with a single partition and use it to store my videos and music on. The old drive, I would put in to service as a backup storage drive.

-JJ

Sounds good. Great advice and suggestions. I'll go from here now that I have a bit more knowledge and see things in a few other pov's.

Thank you everyone!