Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.

Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.

26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.

So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.