Weblog Entry
Geek Etymology
August 09, 2006An interesting question came up the other day — why do I name my hard drives the way I do? I currently run two partitions on all my machines (and name them consistently), and a pair of backup Firewire drives:
- Sparkle
- The main OS & applications partition
- Shine
- A secondary partition to store any personal data, a system which I vastly prefer over the default of dumping all my files into my user folder.
- Gloss
- The main backup drive.
- Glitter
- The secondary backup drive.
You may see a thread here — I operate under the business name of Bright Creative, so the drive names are alliterative synonyms derived from “Bright”. (With the [questionable] added bonus that Sparkle & Shine was a hit by a local band in the 90’s.)
I suspect drive names, and the reasons why people come up with them, could be a fascinating conversation. Let’s get it started. Tell me what you call your drives, and why.
1. iMac: Because it’s the internal drive in my iMac.
2. External 250GB: Because it’s external, and it’s got 250GB of storage capacity. Used for a nighty backup of the internal drive.
Does this mean I’m completely boring?
Right now, the hard drive on my G5 has the astoundingly awesome name of “hd.” It used to be “Diablos” (after my favorite summonable Guardian in the otherwise-lousy Final Fantasy 8). The hard drive on my iBook is called “The Core™”, as in “This is the Core, where we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into the Matrix.”
Can’t remember what the hard drive names on previous computers were, except for the very first Mac I owned, a Performa 6116/60. I bought it used, and it had an Olive Snowboards sticker across the front of it, so it seemed perfectly natural to name the hard drive “Olive.”
My main drive is named, “Macintosh.” I suspect it has something to do with the type of computer I use.
My backup drive is named, “Backup.” I suspect that one has something to do with what I use it for.
I guess I’m just not as creative… or bright for that matter. ;(
I gotta say that I join Jeff and Joshua in the boring department. I have ‘Macintosh HD’ for my PowerBook and ‘Lacie 250GB’ for my backup drive.
I suppose I could be a bit more creative…but hey, at least I have cool icons for my drives!
telnet daveshouse.ca:8080
mount sparkle
mount shine
mount gloss
mount glitter
rm *
mount daveswoman
touch *
exit
Note to self. Remove public IP from About page.
My main drive is named “Zoé”. And my external hard drive’s name is “Brazil”.
I don’t know why I came up with those names, but I think they’re pretty cool, arent’ they?
On all of my computers, the primary drive or partition is named C:. If There’s a secondary drive or partition, it usually goes by the name D:. When I connect my external hard drive or one of my USB flash drives, they usually get called something like F: or G: or H:. I should probably do something about that. : )
Lately I’ve been naming my drives or computers after famous cities. Current system drive is Norfolk, my hometown in Virginia. Internal backup mirror (go Super Duper!) is Norwich, Norfolk’s sister city in the U.K.
My computer is named “nerdbomber” and my primary drive is “little boy” and the slave is “fat man”
Hmmm
My OS drive is called ‘Local Disk’
and my other drive is called ‘Files’
Isn’t that exciting?
My main drive is Macintosh HD because I can’t see to part with the name. Every time I try it feels wrong
For the rest of my drives I names them greek letters. My photography drive it Phi because of the golden ratio and my other drive for my files and back ups is Omega.
Greek meets Geek
Main drive is named Aegis
And three other externals
Stheno
Euryale
Medusa
It is an interesting topic. Mine are named after Addams Family characters:
1. Fester (main app drive)
2. Gomez (main backup)
3. Lurch (music drive)
4. Pubert (firewire drive)
My hard drive is named Asherah, because most computer hostnames that I work with are named after mythical gods (as opposed to the reals gods…). Also, I’d just read *Snow Crash* when I bought my Mac.
My USB thumb drive is named “Lil’ Trooper”, and my backup external HDD is “Ol’ Dirty”.
The drive on our XServe was named Abbott, and the XRAID volume was named Costello (because he was the larger, squattier of the two.)
Computer: Persephone; Partition 1, Artemis; Partition 2, Hades
Computer: Athena; Hard drive, Arachne
Computer: Hephaestus (Win VM: Vulcan); Hard drive, Fire
Computer: Hestia; Hard drive, Hearth
All the computers are names from Greek mythology (Windows VM is the Roman counterpart of the same god(dess)). Their hard drives/partitions are named for attributes or related names to the deity. Don’t know why, but it’s a tradition I’ve maintained for several years, and will probably continue to do it for many more …
Brubeck: Laptop
Ravi: External 250G
Alvin: iPod 40G
The only organization path I follow is keeping everything in a “Working” folder so its easy to throw onto the external. However, I really need to get some sort of RAID going. I’d probably sleep easier.
I used to name all the computers on my network after planets. My current iMac is called Saturn, so Firewire drives get named after Saturn’s moons. I have Tethys and Hyperion so far.
Ingwe: Laptop HD
Ngala: External Drive
Inyati: Flash Key #1
Singita: Flash Key #2
Nkombi: iPod
My little homage to the country of my birth, they’re Shangaan (South African tribe) names for Africa’s Big Five.
“I suspect drive names, and the reasons why people come up with them, could be a fascinating conversation”
You really weren’t kidding when you put “geek” in the title of the post :)
Mine are all Radiohead themed. Each (of the three) Macs I have is named after a member of the band. Computers and their primary hard drive get the same name. I’ve got an external drive called “Ziggurat” (they had a thing on their web site), and another I bought just for editing a little holiday movie called “Exit Music”.
My flat’s wireless network is “Planet Telex” (album track). My Airport Express’s network is “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” (b-side). My old phone was “Airbag”, my new one is “Follow Me Around”. My first iPod was “Googly Minotaur” (after a little thing they had on the internet). My iPod Shuffle is thus “Googly Minnow-taur”.
I’ll get me coat.
Far less exciting, but: “simplebook” for my main machine, and “simplesafe” for the FireWire backup.
Am I the only one who names them Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. according to the green alphabet?
On my PC’s the harddrives are called “Local Disk”, on my new MacBook Pro the harddrive is called “Macintosh HD” and my 120gb external is called “External”. I had another Interal in my PC which was partitioned into “Photos” and “Internal” but that drive recently died as I tried to copy my photos over to the external. Does anyone know what can be done about a broken read write arm? I believe the platters are perfectly fine and still hold all of my data but I have no access whatsoever because the read write arm isnt functioning.
Hmm. I named my hard drive “Darth” which is actually the same name as my computer. It just sort of happened after I was playing with MacSaber at work (Black Macbook… it was only logical!).
Windows, Programs, and Media. Creative, huh?
We (parents & I) put the creativity into computer names instead. Started out with a Calvin & Hobbes theme: calvin, hobbes, moe, and wormwood. Calvin and wormwood have been retired and spiff has been added since then, but I didn’t stick to the theme much after that with shoggot, kiert, shim, and acetylene. That’s three windows desktops (shoggot, spiff, hobbes), two linux servers (moe, acetylene), one linux laptop (shim), and one windows laptop (kiert).
Guess which one of them is the oldest and you win a prize.
My computer is named Rocky, after my dad, because what’s the point of having a dad with a cool name like Rocky if you can’t name a computer after him?
My hard drives are all named from Barry Manilow songs: Mandy, Lola, Linda, etc.
my hard drivers are named Jack & John and the computer is named Blue
Mine used to be more exciting than they are at the moment (used to name all my partitions and external drives after my fav a cappella groups). Right now I’m actually in line right ahead of Croftie for the Most Boring Drive Names award:
–
Startup Disk: Macintosh HD (on the PB, G5, eMac, iMac, and, um, everything)
External Drives: 300GB External (insert whatever capacity on the front end. Only exception is my Porsche 160GB, which is named 160GB Porsche).
–
After seeing Dan C’s naming, I’m tempted to live on the edge a little, and switch to “superfluousdrive” etc., but I might be asking for failures if I take that route…
I call my drives C:\ and D:.
It’s kinda awesome.
All great (my opinion) SF/Fantasy/Speculative Fiction authors. Currently:
- Gaiman (15.4” PowerBook)
- Gibson (Portable USB Drive)
- Grimwood (Mini-NAS)
- Effinger (Windows PC)
Holding aside Mieville for the server I’m about to buy.
All my hard drives are their respective generic letters but my wireless network is “The Shire.”
I do need to set the name of my desktop to Bag End and the laptop to Rivendalle though.
Mine are derived from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Main: Chiba
Backup: Sprawl
I love that book.
Primary internal is Love’s Bitch. DVD backups go to Watcher, everything else is backed up to Willing Slave. Small auxillary drive is L’il Bit. Offsite backup of the backups is Tara. Network is Faith. Printer is Trick. Black iPod = Red. Defective laptop = Zeppo. The name probably is what accursed it to so many logic board failures.
Some of these obviously are more aptly named than others. No Slayer yet; didn’t want to tempt fate by inviting a device to start crashing stuff.
Geek? Hell yeah.
Home Windows box (Niobe): System, Temp, Games, Data, Data 2, Data 3, Data 4
Work Windows box (Nikko): System
Work Mac Mini (Cheeseburger): Macintosh HD, Pickles
MacBook (Kali): Macintosh HD
BSD server (Mouse): /
Windows server (Jeeves): System, Data
Pickles on Cheeseburger seems to be my only interesting drive name, was named Cheeseburger as the Mini is about the same size as a cheeseburger, then of course it needed to have pickles on it :)
Maybe I should change Macintosh HD to ‘Meat Pattie’ or something :p
I name not only my computers (Truday and Willy) and drives (Also Trudy and Willy), but also my USB flash drives (Alex, Sammy, Curtis, Mikey), cell phone (Timon), PDA (Melvin replaced Toby), and my car (Zoom replaced Spify replaced Zippy).
I think it has to do with customization and personalization—how much an individual tweaks with his technological devices and adjusts settings to fit his work habits. But I could be wrong.
I’m a sucker for threads like this. I name my hard drives after characters from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Internal Powerbook HD: Zaphod
External HD (two partitions): Oolon and Colluphid
And to thread-hijack, the names of my non-hard-drive electronics:
iPod: Ford Prefect
Cell phone: Vogon
Wireless router: Slartibartfast
Web server: Fenchurch
Unused as of yet: Marvin and Arthur Dent. Trillian is already the name of something famous and computer-related, so I’m not naming anything after her.
As a pilot, my drives are named after aeronautical geekery:
Airframe - internal PowerBook drive
Canard - 300gb external media drive
Airfoil - 180gb backup drive
Copilot - iPod
Main Drive: Bender (Futurama fame)
Backup Drive: Finn (Sidekick from Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net)
I am a boring linux geek, my partitions are named:
/ - my linux root partition (ext3fs)
/storage - for all downloads, warez and such (fat32)
/music - use your imaginations of what’s stored here ;) (fat32)
/home - home folders for the users of my pc (the user count is one >.>) (ext3fs)
/var/www - apache resource directory (ext3fs)
/media/hda1 AKA C:\ - primary windows partition, for legacy reasons only (ntfs)
c: System
d: Programs
e: Data
I’m either pragmatic or boring … or perhaps both?
:)
I don’t name my drives (can you do that in Linux? I’ve never tried), but I do name my computers. Right now my trend has been naming them after AI’s from Bungie games:
durandal - Linux PC
thoth - file server
tycho - Windows PC
I haven’t found a computer to name ‘leela’, and I’m saving ‘cortana’ for the Macbook I’ll eventually get :)
Hmm… I have Hammer (os) and Chisel (data) on one machine - those don’t quite work together with their purposes very well.
Our main server is Beast (250gb) and the backup is Burro (Spanish for donkey - also 250). Both do a lot of work, but Burro is Beasts’ donkey (backup).
:D
I used to name my hard drives after cartoon characters or Doctor Who actors, but I found myself changing them regularly as I thought of increasingly cool and funny names.
Of course this screwed up so many things - people’s Quark files would ‘lose’ links to images etc.
I’m no longer in charge of such a large network (career change) but I’ve learnt the lesson and my personal drives are called boring things, though I did rename them the other day:
iMac
Powerbook
iTunes library
Backup
2 partitions called “System” and “Work”.
Even after an evening out with the boys, and half a bottle of something nice and red from France, I still can remember what these stand for, and where things are. Very handy.
All our home computers are named after animals of one sort or another. My daughter’s computer is Bad Wolf (which doubles as a Doctor Who reference). My laptop is Bonacon (a mythical beast; it was a replacement for a very bodgy earlier model, and the idea of a laptop that wouldn’t require constant trips to the repairers seemed quite mythical at the time). All external storage devices are insects: Christmas Beetle (250Gb Maxtor), Flatworm (128Mb thumb drive) and so on. I had an old slow Pentium II called Brontosaurus, but it’s dead now.
When I worked for one government department, I used to name my VMWare virtual machines after the wives of Australian Prime Ministers. Then I decided it was too hard to remember which was which, so I started using superheroes’ secret identities: Windows 9x VMs were Justice Society members, Win2K VMs were Justice League members, WinXP VMs were Legion Of Superheroes members, and Linux VMs were X-Men.
In the old days, I used to name my Macintosh floppy disks after the seagulls in Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Kirk Maynard, Fletcher Lynd, Sullivan Tonn, Chiang, and so on.
I have alltogether five partitions:
1. Marv, Miho and Dwight [last reinstall after watching the Sin City movie]
2. Jake and Elwood [the Blues Brothers]
I name them (the partitions) after the planets in the solar system. Mercury onwards and now the latest is Jupiter.
Wouldn’t be too long before I have to expand beyond though.
My work computer is called Quahog and the three internal drives are named Brian, Peter and Chris. My two external backup drives are called Lois and Meg and my PowerBook’s internal hard drive is called Stewie. As you can guess I’m a big Family Guy fan. :-)
Evolution - Main OS drive, named because my G5 was a free upgrade by Apple after my G4 Tower had a bad MB
Monster - Internal SATA drive, big and fast, in essence a monster
HAL 9000 - External FW drive from AcomData that features a bright LED light on the front of the aluminum case that glows red when accessing the drive… name is cosmetic
BOB 9000 - External FW, sister drive to HAL
Fat Man & Little Boy - Two additional FW drives used in video and audio work, names are purely historical because both of these drive are in large enclosures and are quite loud.
Wow. Naming your computer equipment is really fun. I guess.
I’m in love with with _Windows, _Data and _Secure for C: D: and P: drives. Note the underscore though…
I use them for folders, too. “_Programs”, “_Audio”. They remain on top of the list when sorting via filenames. Yes, I do think that is genious!
Heh, nothig too orignal here. I tend to name my partitions from their purpose:
System
Games
Documents
Music
Pictures
Video
Actually it kind of reflects the inside of a user home on OSX, kinda…
It’s motor (OS/apps) and trunk (personal stuff) at home,
Boot (small boot-up FAT), Pants (OS/apps) and Tie (personal) at work - this all started with Boot and two unnamed partitions when I got the system from our tech.service, so I just followed the path.
My computers and drives are named after Norse gods and have a rather complicated history linking them:
*Desktop: Loki - One of the major gods, a malicious god, father of three monsters.
*Main Drive: Fenrir - wolf child of Loki, eats Odin but is killed by Vidar (Odin’s son).
*Secondary drive: Jormungand - child of Loki, is trapped under the sea by Odin and killed by Thor at the destruction of the universe.
*Laptop: Odin - the major god of Norse mythology (the computer I use the most, but after my desktop computer’s upgrade, a rather underpowered system).
*Main Drive: Vidar - son of Odin, kills Fenrir to avenge his father’s death.
*External drive: Thor, son of Odin, god of thunder, portrayed as a large powerful man (250GB), kills Jormungand.
*Home Network: Asgard - one of the nine worlds.
*USB Drive: Aegir - God of the sea
Mine are nameless. Literally. Nameless01 and Nameless02, named after a group of friends in an online game centuries ago. I guess that makes me a nerd.
At work all servers are called after planets with moons, and the hard discs are called after the moons of said planet.
That was my boss’ idea.
That makes me a lesser nerd.
My computers are all named after planets of the imperium from Dune. The old desktop PC is Caladan, my Toshiba laptop is Arrakis, and my MacBook Pro is Geidi Prime. My home network is named Landsraad, naturally.
My partitions are nothing special; Boot, Games, Swap, Mine, Other, Backup etc etc.
My PCs are from Dune (early books); Omnius (the server obviously ;) ), Erasmus…I only have a server and a normal PC.
My harddrives (or partitions should i say) doesn’t have poetic names.
System (holds the OS)
Home (my personnal files)
Soft (installed apps)
Audio (music only)
Rush (initially used to store my rushes. I don’t shoot anymore, so this big disk is now used as a big cupboard, where I store lots of things which I’ll never use again…Needs cleaning.)
Sorry for my poor english, I’m french… And yeah, my drives do have english names, because it just sound cooler to me that way.
I don’t give original names to my hdd. But my old school had some nice names for their network drives. Beowulf, Neowulf, Blackwulf and also for a little time Testwulf if I’m not mistaking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf
Hmm, the only time I have named a hard drive was years and years ago. It was called ‘Kovuke’ which is a sort of a cross between the Finnish words for hard drive and diskette – think ‘hardette’.
On the other hand, I too have a habit of naming my computers after gods of various mythologies. So far I’ve gone through Rhiannon and Ceres to Freya, and am planning to get myself an Aphrodite by the end of the year. :)
Ooops, I was wrong with my previous post. Those were servernames not networkdrivenames. Sorry.
I don’t have a very planned out naming scheme right now, but I felt the urge a while ago to keep my main disks on names starting with C, which ended up being:
Core - holds everything important, system, apps and work files
Cubicle - external firewire with backups of work files and other more or less important stuff (photos, music)
Cinema I and Cinema II - both mainly hold video files
Creativity - some games at the moment
But then I got a small 2.5” external fw-drive, were the enclosure was called Daisy, and so the disk is named.. Daisy.
Good question, and a lot of interesting answers (to a geek)!
Silver Princess : main drive for the powerbook
Black Phoebe : name of my dell laptop and C: drive.
hda1: (default, not yet named) the Ubuntu partition on the dell.
Mini Phoebe: external hard drive that is black and silver.
Both computers and external drive are named after what they look like. A black phoebe bird is black and white/silver, so the dell was named after the bird. Then when the powerbook came along, it was determined that she would be the new shining silver princess. Aptly named, as after only 6 months, I am having problems with her been finicky and turning off whenever she chooses…
I generally name my computers after ships and my hard drives after swords.
My current laptop:
GoodShipLollipop (displays “TheGoodShipLollipo” most the time)
Partition 1: Durendal
Partition 2: Hauteclaire
Do we need a RFC for naming partitions just like there’s one for computers themselves? http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc1178.txt
I’m also in the lame “Macintosh HD”, “Lacie”, “Cruzer” -group, but PB’s name is Flippy after the lovable bunny in happy tree friends.
main 10,000RPM (150GB)
C: = “Bowsercore” (OS partition)
D: = “The_ARM” (Anti-* Apps; Niven fans?)
E: = “Kaizen” (Apps)
F: = “Funland” (Games - after the carnie in Father Ted)
secondary (350GB)
G: = “FU_GMan” (Mp3s… full)
tertiary (250GB)
Z: = “Bowservision” (other media, mostly fansub animé)
A friend of mine who administered a Mac network used star names, but this was primarily to irritate his colleagues, who could never remember how to spell “Rasalhague” or “Vindemiatrix” when trying to share stuff.
In the old days, when I owned Windows computers, the drives had names like “my_big_disk” and “backup_disk”. When I switched over to first Red Hat and then Xandros, I went with whatever the installation defaulted to. My current drives are called “xandros” and “hdb2”. To compensate, my PC is called “Baker Street”.
I’ve got an external HD which I [apparently] named “Harry”. [I cannot for the life of me figure out why I’d name the external and no other drive!] Also, I did name the two computers on our network [sadly named “MSHOME” or whatever]: “Computra” is my roommate’s computer and “Computros” is mine. “Computra” wasn’t originally a feminine name but an alternate take on it’s old name “COMPUTOR” [which I did not give it].
My current drive names are as follows:
Archimedes
Copernicus
Dyson
Encke
Faraday
Galileo
Herschel
Innes
What an interesting thread!
My eMac is named Egypt
Amon Re, the sun god, is the OS X and Applications partition
Thoth, the moon god, was once upon a time an OS 9 partition, when I had any use for one
Osiris, god of the underworld, houses the murky depths of file storage
I don’t really name drives anything special. They usually get descriptive names like “System”, “Filespace” and “Archive”. Whenever it’s time to name a computer on a network though, it usually gets the name of a Muppet.
my trusty old pismo is “sukeroku” and my current g4 powerbook is “shibaraku” – named for kabuki characters.
Wow, 73 comments and no Simpsons? I’ve worked for/with several different organizations that named network drives after Simpsons characters, with planets/mythological characters a distant second.
Mine:
Drives on Dev: Camus, Sartre, Ionesco
Drives on Net: Radio, Birdman
Drives on Back: LeTigre, Sts, TamiHart (replacing a crashed HD that used to be partitioned into TigerTrap, TeamDresch, and Excuse17)
I prety much name my primary Mac HDs after the machine (Windtunnel HD, TiBook HD, and MacBookPro HD) my Powermac has Storage and “Big Drive”. The only semi interesting thing I did in terms of naming was to call my Windows VM under Parallels “Pariah”. It was a unfortunate moment of Mac snobbery but I have learned to live with myself.
In my uber-nerdom I actually have a couple of different setups:
at home, systems get the name of Greek Titans:
Cronus, Rhea, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion with a network named pantheon
and at work the entire office runs on a Star Wars theme:
Death Star (Production Server), Yavin (Dev Server), Tarkin, Vader, Chewie (other machine names escape me) and a wireless network called the_Force.
Main G5 HD: “Power”
250G Firewire: “Corruption”
40G USB: “Lies”
“Power, Corruption & Lies” was a 1983 album by the group New Order, one of my favorites
/dev/hdb1
And my backup drive is on the server. It happens to be on /dev/hdd
Outside the realm of hard drives, when i was working IT at my job we named the servers after transformers, even based on their responsibilities. misfire was the IDS, optimus prime was the DC, lightspeed and crankcase were the database servers, etc. It was awesome.
Being a Comic Book geek, my drives are named after Justice League characters one my PC.
* C:\ = Flash (250Gb)
* F:\ = Batman (250Gb)
* G:\ = Green Lantern (40Gb)
* J:\ = Superman (600Gb)
On my Mac, the drives are named after Star Wars characters…
* R2-D2
* Vader
* Stormtrooper
We name our servers after cartoon characters. Some names of note: Johnny Bravo, Beavis, Bart, Homer, Fred, Barney, etc. We do have one exception to that though, we named our statistics server Rainman.
I’m a sucker for the Dark Tower by Stephen King, so my computers are all of the Ka-Tet.
The G5 is named Tower, with a Roland partition, an Eddie partition and a Jake partition.
The Macbook is named Susannah with Odetta, Detta and Mia partitions.
My iPod is named ‘Oy’, of course.
This is the most geeky post I’ve read in a while, but it’s great!
Like most others, my harddrives names are pretty uninteresting.
- Windows
- Files
But after reading this I might try something a little different but I haven’t thought of a theme yet.
Currently Deepthought. Past ones have included: HAL9000 and M5 Multitronic.
Maybe I have to name my drives sometime (now called things like ‘download’ or ‘data’), but my pc’s, printers and other hardware have cool names. :-)
Orion (workstation), Aquarius (development server), Aquila (spare server/testing machine), Pavo (a Mac classic), Draco (a very old laptop running Norton Commander and has ghosting at Wolfenstein 3D), Ursa Minor (monitor), Leo (laserprinter), Leo Minor (inkjetprinter), Sagitta (scanner) and I hope to get Libra - the new fileserver. But I’ll guess she has to wait a little longer… :(
I guess I’m just boring…
Local Disk - My Local interal hard drive for the OS.
file-drive - My internal drive for storing my documents and media.
Backup - My external USB 2.0 drive for backing up my laptop and desktop documents and media.
So, I couldn’t resist it:
Andromedia (systemdisk)
Auriga (‘download’-disk)
Pictor (important data)
Delphinus (external drive)
This will not impress anyone. I got strange looks from my co-workers when we got in a conversation about naming.
My main partition is “spinny thing”, and the music partition is “la la”. My music backup is “tra la” and my bootable backup is “macboot”.
I guess you might say the theme is baby talk. But it makes the computer feel more *mine* and the names make instant sense to me.
I use my computer’s name as the name of the main hard drive in that system. All names are somehow related to the Beastie Boys.
PC Desktop: BS2000
PowerBook G4: Count Latchula
PowerMac G5: Big Fat Love (secondary hard drive was ripped from my last PC, so it was named BS2000)
Networked backup drive: Grand Royal
iBook G4: Quasar
iPod: Jimmy James
The networking examples at school always had servers named after various alchoholic beverages and the router being “Barkeep”. Eg. Barkeep asks for Bourbon
Toast (main)
Bagel (external)
Pop-Tart (USB stick)
My iBook’s name is Toaster.
my work machine used to be a Powerbook so I called it Silver Surfer. My work machine is now an iMac G5 and White Monolith just didn’t work for me, so it’s still called Silver Surfer. My home machine is a lamp stand iMac called Iggy. (Igloo-> Iggy, get it?)
Work Machine: Uno, Due, Tre (I’m a simple man who speaks Italian as a second language)
Main file server: Joey, Tommy, DeeDee (The Ramones)
Co-located machine: Mick, Joe_S, Topper (The Clash)
The AFP mounts on those machines are “Donny” and “Marie”
It’s always interesting to see how people name their stuff.
I have a literary bent so:
main = Quixote
secondary = Sancho Panza
The one can’t do without the other…
Wow. There are some really inventive names out there. And now I can prove to my wife I’m not the only one who does it (and thus I’m not that weird after all).
My names are as follows:
iMac (home): Starscream
powerbook (home): Optimus
G5 (work): Maximus (as in Fortress Maximus)
Computers named after talking, shapeshifting robots shouldn’t seem THAT weird should it? Oddly enough, I named my home network Valhalla — from Norse myth, but I guess it would be more fitting to call it Cybertron. Note to self…
It’s been a long time since I’ve named a *drive* anything particularly interesting. I’ve basically got one at this point that inherited its name from an earlier drive that mostly held downloaded media and setup files. It’s called Brain, as in “Pinky and the…” (You can tell I named its predecessor in the mid-1990s).
Naming *computers,* on the other hand…
My parents started a tradition of naming computers after fictional computers. Orac, M5, Eddie (as in H2G2), etc. I’ve stuck with that. My PC at home is named Ghostwheel, after the magical computer in Roger Zelazny’s second “Amber” series. My wife’s computer is named Harumi, after an android in the anime series, “Irresponsible Captain Tylor.”
There were some great names in some of the computer labs back in college, though. We had one computer lab where every PC was named after an alcoholic drink. Another where they were Roman emperors. A set of servers named after characters and places in “The Princess Bride.” Another set of servers named after Renaissance artists. (Well, that’s what we told people: they were Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello.) I wrote them up in a blog post on this topic a few years ago: http://tinyurl.com/mtfgb
Back when I was avidly conuming physics and chaos theory, my two partitions were named:
Uncertainty
Incompleteness
Back when 2GB drives just came out, we bought a $2000, heavy-as-two-bricks monster we named:
2 Big Gigs
Ha! the flash card for my camera is that big now! And the 3.5” 200GB drives in my server cost $200 a couple years ago….
iMac (main drive): Spirou
iMac (secondary drive): Suzette
MacBook (main drive): Saxon
First two derived from a French comic book. Third derived from David Petersen’s Mouse Guard graphic novel which is currently quite popular among indie comics enthusiasts.
Nice topic! The first thing you do when you get a Mac is rename… Macintosh HD is so… blah!
Elsie III (old LCIII)—decommissioned but still remembered
BeastServer (older G3. originally Beast now a testing server)
GigaBeast (dual g4 tower)
Beastette (secondary drive in BeastServer)
Beastette 2 (another secondary drive… seems to bounce around)
PowerBeast (PowerBook)
BeastMedia (Lacie external drive)
EvilBeast (Windows XP box)
As you can see, I seem to have a “Beast” fetish. Compared to Elsie, my G3 tower was a Beast which is how it gots its name.
I am a usual reader of this blog and habitually find it deeply informative, inspiring and sometimes amusing (Bad Domains Kill – Jul 14). I think this is a bizarre topic with no intellectual contribution to the web (and a bit of waste of bandwidth too). Anyway, like Dylan says (11): “nothing exciting”
Partition 1: HDD
Partition 2: Files
Main partition for OS X is Silent Bob. Second partition for OS 9/Classic is Jay (Silent Bob’s sidekick). Music repository is Buddy Christ. All from Kevin Smith’s movies, and the reason is that they all take place in my home town or one of two towns next door.
I usually work with my machines a bit to understand their personality before I attach a ‘permenant’ name to them. But, thus far all the names I have attached to drives have been from an old Animé called Neon Genesis: Evangellion.
G4 Laptop - Shinji
G5 Desktop - Rei
iPod - Miasto
I name my drives and devices after sci-fi robots;
iPod - Soundwave
USB thumb drive - Data
External HD - Bender
Router - Box (from Logan’s Run)
Mac Powerbook - Vincent (from The Black Hole); it’s shiny and portable
Windows Dell desktop - MCP (from Tron); it is developing a mind of its and doesn’t always respond to its user.
Main computer: The Borg
C Drive: Resistance
External: Is
USB drive: Futile
Huge Star Trek fan!
Awful! Just part1 or progs, or archives or movies will do.
Anyone fancy a password!
I’m a big Japanese manga fan, which is apparently when you open up my drive list.
Main: Kaname, after the main vampire from Hino Matsuri’s “Vampire Knight”.
Backup: Yuki, Kaname’s lifesaver.
…Geek, eh? No lie there.
Main Drive - Helvetica
Backup Drive - Copperplate
Typography is love.
main drive : Nidhogg
secondary drive : Ginnungagap
i must be fan of nordic mythology ;-)
My computer is just named after the type it is, e.g. eMac & iMac. External HD’s are named AUX1 & AUX2.
This simply works for me. AUX1 is primary, AUX2 secondary; hoping to get a new HD soon though, in light of Leopard with its Time Machine as well as just needing more space.
Interesting namings from various people though! Being a geek I would describe this post as ‘Cool’ :-)
I used to own a computer that quite frequently stalled (mobo probs), so in honor of that computer I named the drives of the computer that replaced the old one:
C:\Crash
D:\And
E:\Fucking
F:\Burn
Startup: Hannah (the name of my laptop), nice name
External: Fran, nice name
Backup: Backup, Backing up is a serious matter
Ipod 4G: Barry, a name
Ipod Nano: Max, name of my brother’s son; my brother bought it for me
MacBook: Snowflake (my white tiger in D&D and the macbook’s white… and runs Tiger)
HDD: Named Snowflake
PC: Compiler. Not as in coding but as in “putting all my stuff in one place”
C = Brain
D = Design
E = Backup
comment number 17 made me smile ..
our network also uses Greek mythology for inspiration .. Cerberus, Ares etc.
we, too, have Hestia, and i laugh out loud every time i connect to it because “Hestia” is also a company that manufactures brassieres, and i’m sure those guys that named it have no idea about that. we girls get a real chuckle from it.
Wow, I can’t believe I just read all of that. I had started naming PC’s after Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and the hard drives were usually just fishing related in general.
Computer name: HD Names
Big-fish(Main Desktop): One Fish(OS), Two Fish(Programs), Red Fish(Music), Blue Fish(Video)
Little-fish(PDA)
Mobile-fish(Laptop):Hook(OS), Sinker(Files)
Shark(Router/Firewall): SharkFood
Guppy(Thumbdrive)
Barracuda(External Hard Drive)
As a side note, Stefan’s Crash and Burn names remind me of a friend’s computer I was building that was to be overclocked and I felt needed a proper name, “Rugburner.”
I name mine in the following manner (and have been doing so for years):
- Local Disk (OS partition)
- Programs (Program Installations)
- Fun (Music, Videos, Downloads, Documents…)
- Swap Files (Holds swap/paging files)
Yes, the naming is dull but it avoids confusion (I have bad memory, so I would forget if Shine was my data or my OS).
The Fun drive was actually named by my sister. Hadn’t I asked her for a name, I would have probably named it “Data.”
Main: Draco
Second: Pavo
Third: Pegasus
Fourth (portable): Draco-Mini
Dang. Am I too late? Did I miss all the fun?
My primary drive’s name is King of Town.
My secondary drive is The One Ring.
At the time I thought they were pretty creative but I’m wondering now if they’re obscure enough. A true drive-naming genius would come up with stuff that no sane person would ever recognize. I, on the other hand, am just a poseur.
On my old computer, I had a primary drive called Mr. T and a secondary drive called Optimus Prime. So I name ‘em after stuff I like.
On my next machine, gotta name one of them Picard. And maybe the other one, The Impressive Clergyman. That’ll do.
I have a LaCie I refer to as a really high priced paperweight. You can have one too if you depend on a 500 gig too much.
Yeah, lessons learned.
Oh boy, the shame…
My surname is storm so my main drives are named (drumroll):
Thunder
Lightning
It gets worse. We named our 2 girls:
Damaris Aubrey Fire Storm
Zyah Violet Snow Storm
and if we get a boy, Zeth Michael Thunder Storm is reserved for him :)
We`re just freaky hippies at heart :)
C: Clementine (From Eternal Sunshine)
K: Kaylee (From Firefly/Serenity)
M: Monotoya (My name is Inego Montoya…)
C’s my primary, naturally, and I just chose K and M in the event that I move my drives to a new computer and they won’t have to fight with the other drives over drive letters. I hope that made sense.
My C: drive is name “Media-Center” (and so is my computer name), I tend to swap drives out and have more than one computer so I like to name my boot drives the same as my computer name.
My G: drive is called “Giant” (it’s 500 GB).
My H: drive is called “Huge” (it’s 500 GB too).
My M: drive is called “Monster” (it’s 400 GB).
My C: drive is 300 GB.
Generally, I name them where the first letter is also the drive letter I’ve assigned it, and the name somehow relates to the size of the drive with the exception of the boot drive.
I name mine after Russian / Eastern european cities:
Saratov, Safonovo, Kursk, Odessa. Not uber-geek but they sound great to me :)
Local disk, Media and Files.
First person to guess why owes me a cookie!
When my school got twenty brand new Mac Classics with huge amounts of storage (40 whole megabytes, imagine!), I changed the hard disk name to “40 big ones”.
The next morning our teacher announced that one of the Christian Brothers had seen this, was shocked at the vulgarity, and changed it back to Macintosh HD. I still have no idea what he thought Big Ones referred to.
Instead of coming up with spiffy names for my drives, I’ve decided to name them according to function. The only things I think of geeky names for are my different computers:
Coruscant, Primary workstation, G4/450 (Sawtooth)
- System, system volume (Apps and OS)
- User, user volume
- Data, shared data volume, including webroot
- Spare, some space I had left
Kamino, Secondary workstation, G3/350 B/W
- System
- Data
- User
Endor, Windows workstation
- System
- Data
Hoth, Linux/BSD playground, G3/350 B/W (gets whiped 3 times a month)
Yup, all planets and moons from the starwars universe.
My backup drive has three partitions: Maximus, Decimus & Meredius. If I could name the trashcan Commodus, it’d be great :-)
Well, never really thought about naming drives other than for convenience.
WinXP
MusicProg
Storage
MP3
My desktop is called Lydia and my laptop is called Concepta.
For some reason I have always used fairly horrible female names for my computers. Last one was called Gertrude. That was what my dad had called his old car.
My company is called Bananadesign, so…
Gorilla
Silverback
Gibbon
Ape
Monkey
Chimp
My WinBox is wmmxSvr1 (so waiting to be sunsetted)
c:wmmxRaid1
d:wmmx2
My MacBook Pro’s name is wmmxMBP
the hard drive? I think it’s HD. No changes there.
where did the *wmmx* come from?
It comes from webMedia|MX…
What is that? My first ‘personal’ website, now it acts as my wannabe business front - http://www.webmediamx.com -
How Boring.
No special naming for my HD’s, save for the incredibly creative C:, D:, E:, et al…
But, the hostnames for my machines are taken from The Princess Bride:
Windows fileserver = MiracleMax
Linux gateway = Vincini
Linux fileserver = Fezzik
Laptops = Rugen and Inigo
Windows desktop = Westley
main HD= Hero
external HD = Side Kick
On my PC at work (LSM054-AEDIS - company name):
C: is ‘Windows’
My Documents is on my S: ‘Sockdrawer’ drive
And web files are on V: ‘Veb’ (my company already has a W: drive called ‘Web’)
On my iMac at home (‘RedheatCoreDuo’):
‘Macintosh HD’ is my main drive
iPod nano goes by ‘NanoPod’
On my iBook (‘RedheatBook’):
‘Macintosh HD’ is the main drive, again
My external disk is called ‘Sockdrawer’, again
Oh, and all of work’s network machines are named after planets, so ‘Venus’ is our current web server, ‘Jupiter’ is our fat old NAS, and ‘Mars’ does mail.
Several years ago I decided to use fictional planets as machine names. The first that came to mind happend to be from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and realizing I’d probably never have very many machines at once, I’ve been using Hitchhiker’s Guide planets ever since:
Frogstar - my Mac G4, currently in use
Magrathea - my old Windows machine
Traal - my even older FreeBSD machine
Kakrafoon - relic found in trash; was a print server for a while
It appears someone has since made a Wikipedia entry to make my life easier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker’s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
On Frogstar, my drive naming scheme is much less interesting:
main - OS X installation
archive - where I dump all my photos and media
C: Splinter
D: Shredder
F: Serenity
Firewire 1 (120gig): Sirius
Firewire 2 (250gig): Hagrid
iPod 1 (1stgen): Vera
iPod 2 (nano): Hedwig
And I guess I could add that my wireless network is named “Hyperspace_Bypass” (so the neighbours really know there’s a geek among them.)
My iPods are rather uninspired:
iPod Mini - Cathy’s iPod (because it’s my wife’s)
iPod Nano - Peter’s iPod Nano (duh)
iPod (5G) - Peter’s iPod
As is my TiVo, which is simply named “My TiVo”.
At first glance, nothing exciting:
iBook HD
Main Backup
FW External
Flash Drive
Except – get this…
“iBook HD” = my external FW drive
“Main Backup” = my iBook’s HD
“FW External” = my USB Flash drive
“Flash Drive” = my main backup partition
Just to keep me (and any would-be snoopers) on our toes.
Well my main HD is named “/” because thats where it mounts, and It doesnt really give me the option to name it, and my Secondary HD(SCSI 74GB 15k RPM) is named “data”, mainly because its all my important data that I cant afford to lose.
Im not very creative with the hard drive names!
I don’t know that I’ve ever named a hard drive. Where I used to work everyone had two computers: a Mac, and a PC, for cross platform testing. We got to name our computers as we saw fit. The boss had his named for his daughters, the Simpsons fan had Itch & Scratchy, another co-worker had Wallace & Grommet, and mine were Abbot & Costello.
Carbon
Diamond
Eudialyte
Feldspar
Carbon and Diamond are on one physical hdd. The connection should be obvious.
Eudialyte and Feldspar are on another physical hdd. Both are silicates.
Three drives in my PowerMac G4: Dusty Bottoms, Lucky Day, Ned Nederlander (the Three Amigos)
My MacBook: Babe (the pig)
Two Drives in my PowerMac G5: Albini, Turner (My two favorite guitar players, Steve.)
Nice post Dave ;-)
The server I’m currently setting up is called Atlas, after the Greek who was punished by having to push a rock to the top off a hill, but right before he got there the rock always fell down.
My laptop is called “nootboekbart”. “nootboek” is the Dutch phonetic version of “notebook” and “bart” is my name.
Not too original, is it?
Jesus and Moses here.
: )
I used to name my drives after beautiful women I know, but I felt stupid having to explain who “Judy” was and why was I naming my computer after her. Now I name my drives with romanised Japanese women’s names as it is a bit more abstract. Still a little lame but…
G4 - Maiko
G5 - Aichan
1st gen iPod - Spirit of Radio
green iPod mini - GreenTea 綠茶
iPod Photo - iPod Photo
i never thought of naming, but after reading some of the posts, I can only think of cool names to name my computers and my hard drive partitions….its good to know that there are others out there tooo…
names on my mind:
Naruto(from the anime…i love that show)
Athene(Im a big fan of the Iliad..and the character of the gray eyed goddess herself)
Telemachos(son of Ulysses)
or after the Incredible family
oh the possibilities….they are endless
Mac drive: “The Prophet”
iTunes shared library: “The Message”
PC drive: “The Disciple”
Not sure exactly what made me think of this theme, but if there is a universal truth then it is most definitely encoded across The Message.
2 computers, 2 router/firewall and 1 server. All with women names: jena, tabatha, xena, aisha, milaya. Original reason of these names was for security : the computer name souldn’t show its use.
Disks follow a more traditional pattern:
- system
- data1, data2, …
- mobile1, mobile2, …
- backup1, backup2, …
So far, all my storage devices are named after directors I admire (animation or film):
- Miyazaki (as in Hayao, the animator who started Studio Ghibli) 250GB HD
- Lasseter (as in John, the big cheese creative at Pixar) 250GB HD
- Gilliam (as in Terry, former Python and director of Fisher King and Brazil) 100GB HD
- Jonze (as in Spike, director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) 40GB iPod
- Hartely (as in Hal, director of Henry Fool) 60GB HD
- Yimou (as in Zhang, director of Hero and many other great Chinese films) 512MB iPod Shuffle
Swiss themed. Bern, Basel, Zürich, Geneva, [all partitions of a 250GB drive] Lucerne [50GB backup], and Biel-Bienne [512MB USB flash drive]. I yearn for Switzerland. I also tried to pick city names that sort of reflected the kind of data the drive was for.
Why just hard drive names? Why not machine names? Everything I do is Latin. I have had (and reused over the years)
* Nauta (sailor - my old laptop)
* Astras (stars)
* Caelum (heavens)
* Gravitas (weight - my new MBP)
* Theatrum (theater - my MythTV box :D)
* Ecce (behold, look)
* Patrician and Plebeian (noble and peon, a server/client pair)
Not only are these names beautiful, they also relay a deeper connection between the machines.
(P.S. My drive names are boring. I have Macintosh HD and Jack’s Firewire Backup, along with Data and Backup. Not so creative there.)
When I suffered a hard drive failure a couple of years ago, I went and bought an external drive to use for “rescuing” as much data as possible and then restoring. Since I needed two partitions and would be using this drive to repopulate all the data on my computer, I called them “adam” and “eve.”
My main hdd is called disk_XIX because it’s the 19th hardrive I’ve named since I got my first computer in 1992 - an old XT (Intel 8088 processor) runnning at a phenominal 2.4Ghz. It had a 20Meg hardrive that I doubled using DoubleSpace - only because MS-DOS 5.5 took up 6meg of the drive.
My drives are named with a Red Dwarf theme.
System drive is Holly
Data drive is Cargo Deck (previous iterations have had the drive called Red Dwarf and my temporary CD burning directory is usually named Cargo Bay)
Large external hard drive is Starbug
Little blue USB drive is Blue Midget
The overall system (“my computer”) is “The Crimson Short One” although the network name is Red Dwarf.
My iPod currently bucks the trend by being named Darth Bender. Darth because it’s black, Bender because of the shiny metal backplate (as in, “bite my shiny metal arse”). Systems usually cut off the “r” in Bender though, so I might have to think of a new name…
My current hard drives are local disk(OS) and Pixie (data). It’s time for a name change though.
My last hard drives were Pinky (OS) and Brain (data). It’s good to see I’m not the only one. :)
For years I named my OS 9 volume - ImprobabilityDrive
I loved that, but it had the drawback of taking up a lot of space in paths.
Now I call my OS X volume - Max
FW external backup volume - DontPanic
Other FW external volumes - Clone + Cloner
Other internal partitions - Space + Void
Secondary computer - LabRat
powerbook internal: artillery
250 gb external: batalion
memory stick: battery
they replaced julius (internal) and hermann (external)
Well, the drives are not named that interestingly (Primary,Data,RAID respectively…), but the computers themselves are all named interstingly.
The name of my company was based off a comic from the 1970’s/80’s called “Elfquest”, and my office machines are all characters from the comic. “Cutter” (workstation), “Skywise” (internal server) and “Longbow” (iPod)
As for my web/mail/backup production servers, they were all named after charactes from Hitchikers Guide. “Trillian” (web server), “Marvin” (mail server) and “Slartibartfast” (backup server).
I see now why my system admin said Slartibartfast was a bad name… It’s too long and hard to type… :)
For some strange reason, all my hard drives are named after characters in “The Demented cartoon movie” by Brian Kendall, if you are unfamiliar with this masterpiece you can watch the whole agonizing thirty minutes of it here:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/demented.php
A list:
C: KamikazeWatermelon
d: ZiggyHBomb
f: ProfessorBlahsen
And two external drives that are called
MrBigShoe
AutoRomeo (AutoRomeoMaker was too long unfortunately)
Finally, my MacBook harddrive is called
Qrrbrbirlbel
A friend of mine has all his harddrives named after brilliant actors first names, highlights include:
Dolph
Arnold
Jean-Claude
Sylvester
Vin
and so on…
Mine have a bit of a theme…
Our old eMac: Gandalf the Grey (renamed from “Gandalf” after the iBook showed up)
My iBook: Gandalf the White
My Wife’s iBook: Arwen
My External Drive: Mount Doom
My iPod: Eowyn
Our Router: The Shire
Well, I have two themes going… one system uses the names of National Parks that I really like: Zion, Bryce, Arches, etc.
the other one must say something about how Ifeel about some of my work: DailyGrind, CoalMine, BallNChain, etc.
The next obvious discussion is that of what icons you use for your drives.
I’m partial to Gort’s icons by Forest Walker.
Computer: Vigilante (After a Star Trek fanfic I read about 15 years ago)
Main Drive: MamaBear
Data Drive: PapaBear (The bigger of the two drives)
On MamaBear is a small partition called BabyBear that serves to keep the Windows Swap file.
At the time I built the comp I was flatting with a guy who ran an ISP out of the house. All the computers on the network were named after Star Trek ships. It was nice being directly connected to an ISP with (at that time a very large) 2 MB direct pipe. This was back when dial-up was a really neat idea and many people were still using 28k8 or 33k6 modems!
PapaBear has been replaced several times with bigger hdd’s over time. As a matter of fact I think the only original component still on that PC is the machine name and drive naming conventions!
Main Drive “Macintosh HD”
Secondary Drive: “LaCie”
both the default names of the drives when i plugged them in. why? i got sick of coming up with creative names for a drive. the pretty icons are enough nowadays =)
Main drive:
partition one: stuff
partition two: things
Slave drive: junk
When I used to get a new hard drive, it was always enormous compared to the others, so it was always “Jupiter” but then I realized that this would keep happening, so now I call them all generic synonyms for collections of miscellania.
I actually stole the idea for the ‘deepness’ of my partition names from one of my roommates:
XP OS & Programs reside on ‘Church & State’ because as much as I like, putting them on separate partitions got messy in the past.
my data resides on ‘Life’
and my linux partition lives on the ‘darkside’
My computer name are a bit more lighthearted and come from The Land Before Time characters:
Littlefoot for my Laptop
Cera for my desktop
Petrie for my handheld
gives me interesting icons for my shortcuts.
I do the numeric thing:
PB080 is my Powerbook’s HD.
FW250 is my firewire HD.
IP015 & IP060 are the iPods.
Named mine after Captain Planet Powers…
Main Drive (80) - Earth
Video Storage (200) - Wind
Music Storage (120) - Water
External Firewire (80) - Fire
Usb Drive (4) - Heart
Heart is the weakest one for a reason…it was the worst power…
My drives are named after Transformers too…
Jazz - internal mac drive
Onslaught - windows bootcamp partition
Ironhide - backup drive
Brawl - old decomissioned powerbook
Soundwave - ipod
ah… I didn’t think I was that obsessive or anal until i wrote that post!
All named after levels from classic “Doom”…
My laptop’s called “Command Control”; the main HD on my laptop is called “Phobos Anomaly” and the external HD is called “Deimos Anomaly”.
I’ve also got a couple of folder names reserved for “temporary” stuff:
The folder that I use to dump stuff on my USB drive is called “Containment Area”.
On the HDs, the folder name I use for temporary stuff is called “The Farm” – inspired by the movie “The Recruit”.
My computer: Flotsam (Twin Powerbook)
My Girl’s Computer: Jetsam (Twin PowerBook)
Dell Laptop that we sold: Jezebel (she’s a whore)
300 GB Hard drive:
Colossus (partition 1)
Maximus (partition 2)
external drives:
Heckel & Jeckel
I also worked for a company that used transformer names…
Unicron (Database server)
Rewind (Media Server)
Shockwave,Cyclonus,Galvatron,Kickback (Web Servers)
Megatron (Large web server)
Blurr (Chat Server)
Rumble,Lazerbeak (Email servers)
I can’t remember the rest, but I believe there were a couple of others. We had about a dozen servers when I worked there, I think theres almost 2 dozen now.
I’m really boring I guess… My partitions are called C and D! Z is for backup and M is for music.
my computer: George
backup firewire drive: Ringo
Airport network: John
printer: Paul
ipod mini: Pete
named after the Beatles.
(Pete Best was the drummer previous to Ringo)
My external drive is “Tugboat”, because it so small compared to the things that connect to it but pulls them all along. Accordingly, any new computers that connect to it are named after types of large ships.
Why not have fun with the names of your drives? I used to have a Mac that I called Banana Jr. after the computer in the comic strip Bloom County.
These days, I am running a black PowerBook at home (too poor to upgrade right now, but still I’m happy with it), and since the year I bought it, the drive has been named JonnyBook (per my first name). I have an external 2-partition drive. The big partition is named “Longship,” the other “Ringhorne018.”
On my site under “about” (linked, “Jon O” above) is why I chose those two names, it explains. They are, in short, the renowned Viking ship (longship) and the name of one of those ships in Norse mythology. And it suits my website/creative ID, Ringhorne Media. (Why did I pick Ringhorne? Well, I’m Swedish, but I just like the word.
Calling drives persons’ names? This can’t be caused by anything except 2 reasons:
1- feeling of being lonely and isolated.
2- The drive belongs to a person with that name.
What a good idea for a discussion!
I listed some of my names at http://kera.name/articles/?p=28 .. it’s quite a long story but in summary:
PILOT, TALYN, MOYA, AERYN, PROMETHEUS, DAEDALUS, AURORA, ATLANTIS, KERA, NADIA.
Can anyone see the influence behind these names? Hint: they were named chronologically over a period of several years.
I’ve named my drives after some of the wizards from Unseen University (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series)
Ponder Stibbons, Mustrum Ridcully, Windle Poons & The Bursar
Lime, Blueberry .. and Cherry. Does anyone know what’s behind the names? ;)
PS: That’s the partitioning of my old windows machine.. since I use Macs I don’t care to partition the drives anymore..
All my drives/machines are females:
Arwen, Eowyn, Freya, Elastipige (Elastigirl), Embla…
My hard drive is called “The Dude.”
The names I have used are after various places around the world that I have been too that have inspired me or made me think about life.
Amsterdam - My Computer
Algonquin Park / Rushmore - partitioned drives
Naming of hard drives hasn’t changed much over the years, but until I run out of illuminated manuscripts and celtic treasures it will be my habit. Book of Kells, Lindisfarne, Book of Durrow, Sutton Hoo, Cernunos, Tuan, and now Maelmuri for the hard drives… all killed in that order. Followed by my ipod (Sparky, how original) and my wireless Dagda, the irish equivalent of Zeus (who’s yer daddy)… shameful isn’t it.
I name partitions the way anybody can understand whats its purpose: System, Backup, Media, Data, Private etc.
My internal HDs are named after the same as the computer itself (so my PowerBook’s is Envy, Quad G5 is Behemoth, and my work iMac is Grindstone).
My 500GB external is Leviathan, and my 200GB has two partitions, Peregrine, and the stunningly unoriginal Backup (which I keep meaning to get around to renaming, but haven’t come up with a good enough name as yet).
My new rig hasn’t given me it’s name yet, but my previous G4 was Belltower (with drives Sight and Stock)
I was more frustrated with my clients back in the day…
I go the film directors route as well.
Main: Kurosawa
Second: Romero
Powerbook: Vertov
My computer names are the result of geekdom and foodie-dom colliding.
The network is name The Shire, the home of all well-bred Hobbits. However, the members of the Shire take their names from the film _Big Night_, a celebration of gustatory delight not often seen. Thus, the computers are Primero and Segundo, named after the two antagonistic brothers–one is artistic, the other is pragmatic. Kinda Zen.
Of course, we also have the ever so insightful: work laptop.
My desktop is called something boring and practical so that my less than skilled family can find it on the home network. My laptop is Jezebel… she gets around and used to love flirting with all the boys at Uni.
I started naming computers after scottish place names… Inverness, Glencoe (Glen Coe) and Argyll in the network called Highlands. The laptop was called Stirling, and there were many battles with it.
The next one was called Qliphoth (the “evil” in the Qabbala), then renamed Kliffoth since it was easier to spell for others (but not much, ha!). The drives were originally called Samael and Belial after qabbalistic demons/spheres in the qliphotic tree. The computer died, but the next one inherited the name and drives.
With more drives added, I started naming the new drives after metal bands or song titles, starting with “Beyond Space” (from In Flames), “Far Beyond” (Blind Guardian’s “Somewhere Far Beyond”), “Rush” and “Queensrÿche” (with the y-umlaut, thanks UTF-8!).
Then the external disk got named “Terpentine” because it was auto-assigned T: as drive letter, so there went the naming scheme. Other drives were called Gamete (G:), Yggdrasil (Y:) and Zero Point (Z:). The encrypted partitions are called Ratatosk (R:, on Yggdrasil, obviously), Fallout (mounted on Zero Point) and Xenobia (X:).
Now, aside from the fact that I have far too many hard disks…
The primary HD on my desktop is named Wonderboy, just like the computer itself. My 250gb external drive is named H. Maddas, since that matches its drive letter, reflects my love of Arrested Development and houses all my illicit, bittorrented TV shows (much like the purpose of the so-named cooler in AD).
My MacBook’s drive is named Nastyman as is the laptop itself, to continue my Tenacious D computer naming theme.
I have a “ghost” theme going on with my external hard drives.
- Spirit - where I have all my main stuff, documents, programs and media.
- Banshee - a noisy hard drive where I keep downloads that I haven’t sorted yet.
- Wraith - free drive available for when I need space for video or audio editing.
- Revenant - a backup drive for my important stuff.
I don’t really have a theme going, just what I find to be appropriate at the time:
My home PowerMac is “Chewbacca”, with an external HD called “Mini-Me”. It’s a G-Drive that looks like the mini PowerMacs http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE.cfm
My office PowerMac is “He-Man” - for at the time it was one of the beefiest machines in the office.
My windows machine is simply “Pepe” - named for the Looney Toons skunk, who no matter how nice and loving he tries to be, still stinks to high heaven.
Mines are in spanish:
C is “disco durito”, it means “litle hard disk”, but the word “durito(hard)” also has some sexual meaning and is a joke in spanish :P
“me pongo durito” = “i turn on/I turn hard”
It’s hard to translate, I know.
D is “José” because the disk was of my brother José, and I came up with that great idea :P
I have two machines, a Mac laptop named Shelob, and a PC desktop named Ungoliant. For you LOTR goons, Shelob was the name of the spider from the books, and Ungoliant was Shelob’s mother and consort to Melkor, Middle Earth’s flavor of Satan.
It *is* Melkor, right?
Ok, I didn’t even realize how boring I was before… But now that I do, I’ve renamed my harddisks from:
“Macintoch HD” and “External”
to
“Babbage” and “Lovelace”
I could also have gone for “Jobs” and “Wozniak”, but in a way the relationship between Charles Babbage as the inventor (OS X, Software et cetera) and Ada Lovelace as the assistant and ‘programmer’ (files, work et cetera) sort of feels more right… Now I just need a new drive, that I can name “Engelbart”…
Oh, the pioneers… Perhaps I should start a server park, so I’ll be able to fit in “Holzschlag”, “Shea”, “Cederholm” and so on, and so on as well… :P
Mine all have geeky, pretentious Greek names:
Leucosia (one of the Sirens) = iPod
Hesperia (one of the Hesperides) = eMac
Arethusa (another of the Hesperides) = MacBook Pro
I’m still shoping around for a name for my backup HD. Right now I’m thinking of Eurydice or Proserpina for their afterlife/springtime connotations, but I’m not sure I like the idea that backed-up equals death. It’s a little unsettling.
We name our hard drives along with the computer’s sharing name. Right now we have two systems, see if you can guess the pattern:
System 1:
Agathon
Dualla
Baltar
Galactica (server)
Pegasus (server)
System 2:
Swearengen
Bullock
CalamityJane
Tolliver
Garret
Cochran
MisterWu
Blazanov
Trixie (router)
TheGem (server)
At my office we use a lot of external drives. We take turns naming them.
Flippy the Dolphin -me
catering to me
the boiled peanut
terry
brick
Unfortunatly I think we are going to have to start using more project/boring oriented names.
Certified, 100% dork:
Computer: Erinyes
Main Drive: Alecto
Backup Drive: Megaera
Main Partition: Tisiphone
The three furies (Erineyes) of order in greek mythology. I like the names plus it leaves a world of possibility open for future names from the same etymology.
“Coeur” & “Argent”
Coeur: French for “heart”. It’s the heart of the Mac after all.
Argent: French for “silver”. It’s a fanless, aluminum cased external drive.
Someday I hope to cure my craving for Paris.
I even made custom icons:
http://www.ohdanny.net/images/argent.png
http://www.ohdanny.net/images/coeur.png
Dream based etymology? Color based etymology?
Mine are called “big” and “little”.
Not very “bright”, am I? :-)
Bobbie
The 80GB drive inside my laptop has three partitions:
Dead_Parrot (system volume)
Wodja (data)
Fwedewick (data)
As you can see, I’m a bit of a Monty Python fan. I also have a 200GB external sitting on my desk, also with three partitions:
FatBastard (85GB)
DoctorEvil (85GB)
MiniMe (30GB)
I’ve been a big fan of creative volume names, ever since the MS-DOS days. I still stick within the original DOS limit of 11 characters (for volumne names), just for old times’ sake.
I, oh so cleverly, named mine…”main drive” and “external drive”.
Beat that!
Mine are Harry Potter based….
Computer Name “Mischief Managed”
C: James (OS)
D: Sirius (Program Files)
E: Remus (Downloads, Fonts, Stock Photos, etc)
F: Peter (Personal Files & Artwork)
I: Severus (External Drive)
If I were cool enough to have USB drives, Ipods and the like; I’m sure I’d keep up the naming scheme. lol. Unfortunately, I’m still in the starving artist stage of my design ;)
Computer name: “Nikoletina”, it’s the name of the “hero” in the book of one famous Serbian writer which I read many times as a child.
Computer descirption:
“Munja nebeska”, which means… something like “Lightning from the sky”. It’s because I was delighted with the computer’s performance and speedy execution of all tasks at the time when I bought it (although it’s pretty fast now, too :))
Partitions:
C: “Kuhinja” - means “Kitchen”, because many nasty things get cooked there :)
F: “Spajz” - something like… hm, “store-room”
E: external 250GB drive is “Podrum”, means “vault” or “basement” :)