any way to control disk order?

[Tom Horsley]

My poor old system died, and I resurrected it by moving the
disks to an older system. For who knows what reason, the
kernel has decided to call the external USB drive I use for
backups /dev/sda (the old system called it /dev/sdc).

My internal sata disks are being called /dev/sdb and
/dev/sdc.

This screws with things like hddtemp where you have to
give it args like /dev/sda /dev/sdb.

I don't suppose there is any available mechanism for
forcefully inducing the kernel to enumerate removable
drives last?