Straight away, i want to apologise for the question - it is precisely the form of question which is, rightly, discouraged and looked down upon - it is vague, imprecise etc.

But the fact is, I am totally confused about the change which took place with 13.1 (?) when suddenly my /dev/hda and /dev/hdb became /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

My IDE PATA disks are now described as SCSI by various programmes - eg PARTED.

I suppose the question boils down to "What is SCSI" and how does SCSI differ from IDE?

For example, is there an adapter cable whereby I could install SCSI disks instead of IDE disks and the OS would treat them as the same?

I am posting here because, since we have only recently had this change, I imagine that there are others who are wondering what it means but, like me up unitl now, were frankly too embarrassed to ask such a vague, and perhaps for the experts, naive question. I feel as if something has been missed in my basic IT education.

Perhaps another way to look at this question is "What advantages do users with IDE disks have, now that their disks are "seen" as SCSI disks?".

This has been around for over 4 years - as per usual, Slack is way behind the developing technology.

Have a read of this. A quick google will no doubt bring later references.

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Thanks, syg00. that was sort of information I needed to sort out the issue in my head. Looks like a good site too

Yes, by design. Slackware is not Fedora, and Pat knows that its users don't want to be guinea pigs for 'developing' technologies,

From that article you linked:
Waiting for new things to mature fully before adopting them isn't so bad an idea, but at the same time, there's also a role for distro's like Fedora which are intended to be test-beds. Neither distro should be seen as better or worse than the other because of this choice, they're just servicing a different niche.

Now, perhaps Pat's "If it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude can be a little over cautious at times, but given Slackware's longevity and proven track record for stability it's hard to criticise him for it: as it clearly works.

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I look at it like this. If it works on Fedora, it can work on Slackware. The other way around is not necessarily true.

We switched to this two years ago once libata actually supported the majority of IDE/SATA controllers. I guess we could have subjected our users to a painful beta test by switching earlier, as many distributions did.

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This may not completely answer your question, but here's an extract from file CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT of 13.1:

This is the way I want it to be. I like it that Slackware does not subject me to new features that are not yet mature, while still making it easy to go ahead and try them on my own (e.g. building a new kernel, hacking rc scripts).