mjhjmtu

If one is interested only in block storage devices, one can use lsblk from widely-available util-linux package:

$ lsblk -o KNAME,TYPE,SIZE,MODEL
KNAME TYPE SIZE MODEL
sda disk 149.1G TOSHIBA MK1637GS
sda1 part 23.3G 
sda2 part 28G 
sda3 part 93.6G 
sda4 part 4.3G 
sr0 rom 1024M CD/DVDW TS-L632M

It lends itself well to scripting with many other columns available.

You could trawl through the output of lshw and extract details about devices in the disk or tape class (and maybe others - storage class gives you details on storage controllers, scsi, sata, sas, etc).

e.g.

lshw -class disk -class tape

The -short option gives a nice compact summary. e.g. on my home zfsonlinux server/workstation/experiment-box (no tape devices unfortunately):

# lshw -class tape -class disk -class storage -short
H/W path Device Class Description
=========================================================
/0/100/4/0 storage JMB362 SATA Controller
/0/100/5/0 scsi10 storage JMB362 SATA Controller
/0/100/5/0/0.0.0 /dev/sdc disk 120GB Patriot Wildfire
/0/100/b/0 scsi1 storage SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]
/0/100/b/0/0.0.0 /dev/sdd disk 1TB WDC WD10EARS-00Y
/0/100/b/0/0.1.0 /dev/sde disk 1TB WDC WD10EACS-00Z
/0/100/b/0/0.2.0 /dev/sdf disk 1TB WDC WD10EACS-00Z
/0/100/b/0/0.3.0 /dev/sdg disk 1TB ST31000528AS
/0/100/b/0/0.4.0 /dev/sdh disk 1TB ST31000528AS
/0/100/b/0/0.5.0 /dev/sdi disk 1TB ST31000528AS
/0/100/b/0/0.6.0 /dev/sdj disk 1TB ST31000528AS
/0/100/11 scsi2 storage SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
/0/100/11/0 /dev/sda disk 128GB Patriot Torqx 2
/0/100/11/1 /dev/sdb disk 1TB ST31000528AS
/0/1 scsi11 storage 
/0/1/0.0.0 /dev/sdk disk 1967MB SCSI Disk
/0/1/0.0.1 /dev/sdl disk SCSI Disk
/0/1/0.0.2 /dev/sdm disk SCSI Disk
/0/1/0.0.3 /dev/sdn disk SCSI Disk
/0/2 scsi66 storage 
/0/2/0.0.0 /dev/sdo disk SCSI Disk
/0/3 scsi67 storage 
/0/3/0.0.0 /dev/sdp disk 4057MB SCSI Disk

The /0/1 devices are actually a USB card-reader (there's a 2GB SD card plugged in to one of the slots), and the /0/2 device is my android phone plugged in for charging only. The 0/3 device is a 4GB USB flash drive.

lshw can produce plain text, html, xml, and json output. It can also dump hardware details into an sqlite database format.

It is packaged for debian and most other distros. The home page and source is at http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter

Please, try this command

ls -l /dev /dev/mapper |grep '^b'

It will list you all block devices in your system

You can use lsblk to list all block devices, along with whether or not each device is read only.

You can then use grep and awk to print the names of block devices that are not read only:

lsblk -d -n -oNAME,RO | grep '0$' | awk 'print $1'

lsblk will list all block storage devices.

fdisk -l will list all of the partitions on all devices that are listed in /proc/partitions

lshw -short will give you information about all of the hardware (except perhaps firewire) on the system.

If, as per your response to derobert, you're looking for something that lists tape drives and printers, you may be interested in lsdev, lsusb and lspci.

You can try the following command :

file /dev/disk/by-id/* | awk -F'/' 'NR>1print "47/dev/"$NF' | sort | uniq

You can use hwinfo to list all disks (documentation).

hwinfo --block --short gives an overview:

disk:
 /dev/sdb WDC WD3200AAKS-7
 /dev/sda SAMSUNG HD103UJ
partition:
 /dev/sdb1 Partition
 /dev/sdb2 Partition
 /dev/sda1 Partition
cdrom:
 /dev/sr1 TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-H653B
 /dev/sr0 HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDRH20N

hwinfo --disk gives more details for each disk.

FYI: on some Linux distributions such as Ubuntus 14.04 and higher, hwinfo isn't present in the official repository.