On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 04:41:55PM -0500, Russell via talk wrote:
I've always found it a weird polyglot convention that ATA drives are mounted as /dev/sdx. I know that has to do more with historical convergence of increased ATA transfer rates with scsi parallelism, but it's still kind of confusing.
Well given ATAPI is SCSI over ATA, and hence to support anything other than harddisks, you need to support SCSI commands, it seems like making ATA disk command just be another flavor of scsi in the kernel made sense. I am not sure how SATA fits in given SAS supports SATA but not the other way around. I believe SATA still uses ATA commands, unless it is not a harddisk in which cases it uses SCSI through ATAPI as it did on IDE. I have seen suggestions that it makes more sense to think of /dev/sdX as storage disk X rather than scsi disk X. Doesn't help for /dev/sg which is scsi generic, so we probably should just live with it and not worry about the naming as long as it works. Not like /dev/hdX ever meant IDE. I believe it was used for IDE, MFM, and a few other types that are probably no longer supported. -- Len Sorensen