Lifespan of a loaded and disconnected new Hard Drive

[tetralin]

First off, hello and glad to be here. OK, I am interested in the opinions from my fellow tekies on the lifespan of a new hard drive loaded to the hilt with images, video's, documents and maybe a few progs. The hard drive will be promptly removed from the computer and carefully stored in a controlled environment.

I am thinking of obtaining a couple of IDE or SATA drives and duplicating my backup between 2 drives. I am 46 years old. (if it helps in your calculations)... Will my great or great greats, or future historians/archeologists be able to view the majority of the content in say 100 or more years(if the human race survives that long)from now? If you think not, please give your thoughts on how long they may be readable, and any means of storage which would help in it's longetivity. I know this could be a deep subject, but I am interested in the basics of the concept. Thanks in advance!

 

[edfair]

There was a recent MMM announcement about a new process they have.

I've lost the link but the short bit I saw was 50 years or so.

 

[JimInKS]

An interesting story of the problems NASA is having restoring 40 year old lunar data.

http://www.computerworld.com/action...cleId=9134771&source=CTWNLE_nlt_hw_2009-06-29

 

[tetralin]

Thanks very much! Your responses were great! Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

I think I am going to mirror a couple of new 250gb IDE drives, Seagate seems like a good bet. Put them into separate external USB cases and store them in different secured locations. I will scan them annually, and replace them every 10 years, or when needed.

I have a feeling that before I'll need to replace the first set of drives, something will evolve to enable the average computer user long term, secured storage of unlimited data.

Another question. What about the lifespan of solid state drives or flash media.

 

[JimInKS]

tetralin,

That sounds like a good plan. I might suggest that you use drives from different vendors as occasionally a particular vendor will have a bad run with high failure rates.

I have had some bad luck with high capacity Seagate drives and have been using Western Digital lately. I don't know if it's just my luck, but the higher priced "enterprise" level sata drives seem to have caused me more trouble than the cheaper "consumer" grade drives.

 

[FredWagner]

Related topic regarding antique media, go to

http://www.computerworld.com

and search for NASA Moon Landing Tapes - fascinating article!

Fred Wagner

 

[kjv1611]

---------I know this is old, but just looked at the thread for the firs time.--------

==>Another question. What about the lifespan of solid state drives or flash media.

I'd say that within a couple of years, SSDs will definitely be the way to go, especially if you're talking about less than 250GB. The prices are falling fast, so within a couple of years, you'll be able to get quite a bit of storage for minimal cost.

SSDs should, I would think, be less prone to failure than HDDs if not being used in a computer. It would seem to me that the elements would have far greater effect on an HDD b/c of the mechanical parts.

Another thing I'd suggest is keeping a couple of different types of adapters handy with the hard drives. For instance, you could store a USB adapter and network storage enclosure, perhaps? Of course, if you're checking on them every year, then this won't matter, b/c you'll know when the technology changes are getting serious.

From articles such as this one and others I've read of late, in 10 or 20 years, it's conceivable that the computers could just be using light for internal connections, and maybe bluetooth or some other wireless tech for all external connections, so you'd want to keep that in mind as well, with your changes.

One thing you can count on: So long as the earth is here, and man has control, and technology is being further developed, that the changes will occur at least as fast as they have to date. Well, that's based on history so far. Who knows if it might hit a speed bump along the way?

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[wvdba]

hi,
i have an original IBM pc that came out in 1981, model 5150. 2 years later, when i was developing a point of sales/inventory control system for a automobile parts company, i had to look for a bigger drive than the original 80/160k floppy drive the computer came with. i found a hard drive (davong systems) with a whopping!!! 5 meg of storage. this was revolutionary at the time. it held the equivalent of 60/30 floppy's worth of data. i still have the IBM-PC and the hard drive. that was 26 years ago. the data is still readable with the computer. the controller for this hard drive extended from the front to the back inside the case. but the data is readable. but i'm not betting on how long this would last. i think solid state media is the way to go.
cheers.

 

[edfair]

IBM may have been slow in getting hard drives installed. Just about all of the other micro suppliers had them working before IBM released the PC.
You were lucky that you didn't start a couple of years later when the AT just about bombed because of the CMI 20mb drives that had 33% DOA, 33% 30 day failure rates. I have 5 & 10mb CMI drives that I suspect that would work today if I cranked them up, they didn't have the media issues of the 20.

I've spent the last couple of days working with Maxtor 400mb IDE drives. At this point, 3 of 4 that were working when stored 10 years ago have gone TU. They were cleaned, marked, and stored in 1999, manufactured in 1995, with 2 years of use, then stored till 1999. So at this point I would suspect that storing data on 400mb Maxtors would have guaranteed 75% data loss. I should also admit to multiple Samsung drive failures from the same time frame and one WD.





Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.