question about hard drive detection problems

I don't know how "technical" it is, but it's not really a problem of a lack of proper drivers for the type of drive. The drivers are for the drive controller, which is usually built into the chipset. The chipsets change frequently as CPUs and other advancements are made. Each chipset has its own driver or driver set. If an existing driver is not able to correctly communicate with the controller, no drives connected will be detected or will be detected incorrectly.

Linux drivers are often way behind Windows drivers. For example, some drivers may take six months to a year after their Windows counterparts to become available. Other drivers may provide support for a "family" of chipsets. These may provide full support on some controllers and only partial on others. There can also be speed differences.

On top of this, the Linux drivers are usually built into the kernel, meaning it's not an easy thing to just "add" a driver (like it is for Windows). They also often have bugs or changes build-to-build that break support for previously supported hardware.

That explanation makes sense, especially since the drivers are probably coded at the assembly or machine-code level for each chipset, so the code is not likely very portable.

But I seem to recall many times where people can't seem to detect a newly purchased drive connected to the same machine they've been using all along. Or they can detect one drive, but not another connected to the same machine. In that case the drive controller would be the same for all drives connected to that machine, so this explanation wouldn't seem to apply in those cases, or am I missing something?

Some boards have several controllers. This places some drive ports/connectors on one and some on another. Many boards do this with both IDE and SATA ports. For example, there may be the main SATA controller and then another one that adds IDE support and one or more additional SATA or eSATA ports.

There are also some drives that don't work correctly in a certain mode. For example, an SSD drive that requires AHCI to function. Changing the controller's mode often time changes the drivers required for it.

In some cases, the connection of a certain drive (or type of drive) may cause problems with the detection and/or operation of another drive.

There are so many different combinations that it makes it pretty much impossible to account for all of them. I've read cases where a certain brand of drive just would not function correctly in a computer. Switching to a different brand works perfectly.

Thanks.