Lost Bus

Sorting through PC parts, I found an old hard drive. Three and a half inches, a heavy slab of metal. The label still has a faint scribble on it.

I wanted to read it.

I turned it over to look at the connector and let out a small sound. Sixty-eight pins, that distinctive shape. SCSI. Ultra160.

Early 2000s, the eve of SATA. Back when IDE's flat ribbon cable still ran from motherboard to drive, I was deep into SCSI. If you wanted real speed, you went SCSI — that was the air I breathed. I had Ultra160 disks as my system drives. The one that came out is probably from then.

I was into RAID at the same time. Mainstream RAID was SCSI too — the world of business servers, but when the same controller chip came out as an IDE card, I ran to Akihabara to buy it. RAID5 was the dream. RAID1 and RAID6 were luxuries. Those array-building nights were fun. Four drives lined up, the case open, watching the benchmark numbers. Back then I genuinely believed that if storage got faster, the world would get better.

A while later, SATA arrived. Once you saw that one slim cable, you couldn't go back to the thick sixty-eight-pin ribbon. The inside of the case suddenly looked spacious.

A little later, the server side went serial too. SAS. The SCSI command set stayed the same. Only the wires got thinner, sharing the same small connector with SATA. A SAS HBA accepts SATA drives, but not the other way around. From there, server storage flipped over fast, and parallel SCSI disappeared from new products. The Ultra160 in my hand is from just one step before that turn.

To read it, I'd first need a PCI SCSI host adapter. The used market still has them. Bandwidth doesn't matter — I just want to read. The real problem starts after that. I need an OS where the driver still works. Names like aic79xx and sym53c8xx are still in the current kernel, but they could disappear any day. I need a motherboard that runs that OS. If I need a motherboard, I need a CPU, a power supply, a case. The chain runs deep. Once you step in, you can't step out.

I gave up.

The SCSI standards stayed complicated to the end. Narrow, Wide, Ultra, Ultra2, Ultra160, Ultra320. Fifty-pin, sixty-eight-pin, eighty-pin SCA. LVD and HVD shared the connector but ran at different voltages, and crossing them would fry the card. Termination position decided whether it worked at all. All of that is lost knowledge now.

And RAID, somewhere along the way, became an on-prem thing. You don't see RAID cards on store shelves anymore. Even on servers, it's handled by the motherboard BIOS, configured silently from a setup screen. When you build something on the cloud, storage redundancy is a given. Throw it at S3 and somewhere behind the curtain it gets replicated. RAID5 or RAID6 or erasure coding, I don't know anymore. Probably I don't need to.

The drive sat on my desk for a while, then I put it away. I was staring at it when something occurred to me. This might be one of four — a disk from when I finally got to build that dream RAID5. The format was probably NTFS. If so, I don't remember where the other three are. One disk reads nothing on its own.

There's probably code on it that I wrote back then. Just as well I can't read it.