Laptop drives use SCSI interfaces?

[Antoneo]

Hey guys, I was observing my friend boot up linux (SuSE) and I don't know much about it except he laughs at me since I only use WinXP since it runs everything I need and with aplomb. When I ask him why he dual boots linux and WinXP on his laptop instead of just using WinXP since that's where he does all of his work, there is no answer from him. He was also have trouble trying to get something working since the drivers weren't loading for a device.

Well anyway back to the background to my question. I was observing the "boot up text" on the laptop and noticed scsi drivers being loaded. I asked him about it and he said most laptop drives (HD and CD rom drives) are SCSI devices which surprised me. I understand that the SCSI acronym itself, Small Computer System Interface, seems to refer to the portables but thought they usually ran on ATA or some modified version of that.

Well, is he right?

EDIT: Doh! thanks MWink, those wide cables sure aren't a sign of serial

 

[FishTankX]

Well, I believe in Linux all storage controllers are called SCSI.

It's very rare to see SCSI in a laptop since you need extra controller chips and SCSI devices are usually high RPM power hungry beasts. I believe I saw a IDE RAID controller under SCSI devices in windows, so perhaps his IDE controller is also being detected as a SCSI device. SuSe probably doesn't have the drivers for his particular type of IDE controller. Thus, it doesn't work right.

 

[MWink]

SCSI = Small Computer System Interface.

To answer your question, almost all if not all laptops use IDE. You can actually take most any laptop hard disk and hook it to a desktops IDE controller using only a small converter. Laptop CD-ROM's are also usually IDE though they have a different connector.

 

[Antoneo]

Thanks for the answer guys, you see this friend of mine was always spewing out stuff he really didnt know and then would convince me that I was the one who was wrong. He also said Microsoft was definitely going open source. Right. Me, seeing him do a kernel recompile (or whatever), thought perhaps he knew something now but guess people don't change.