Actually that information is a combination of the disk model identifier and serial number as obtained by SMART. It does make some sense! Though you are right when saying it isn't immediately obvious in what it means...
(makes me wonder if I should change that too)
Some of the unMenu screens display model and serial separately. When it comes time to actually pull a drive the serial is the most important. In fact all my drives have the serial on a manufacturer's sticker on the end where it is easily visible without removing any drive from the drive cage in the case.
Kode, this is important. Design Model/Serial for real use cases
That's the information provided by disks.ini, how does it look in boxcar? I would need some way to reliably store the information because I don't want to be doing smart lookups everytime you look at the page, could I not just explode by "_" and use [0] for model and end() for serial?
Boxcar gets it direct from SMART: https://github.com/nicinabox/boxcar/blob/master/lib/boxcar/api/smart.rb#L16. You could memoize and store it in memory to prevent subsequent SMART lookups. SMART can be slow on some disks, so you'll want to use async when possible.
Splitting on the underscore may or may not be reliable. Seems like it would work from this sample, but who knows in reality. There are some sample files in the repo I use for testing. You are, of course, welcome to them.