News Twenty percent of hard drives used for long-term music storage in the 90s have failed

[DingusDog]

I have a couple WD 500Gb IDE drives that are almost 20 years old and a couple 80Gb drives even older than that. All of them still work. Nothing important on them though.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I’d be curious. If we ask AI to generate an original recording of “Let it be” by the Beatles, I suppose people might eventually confuse it for the original.

How Artificial Intelligence Completed Beethoven's Unfinished Tenth Symphony

On October 9, the work will be performed in Bonn, Germany, and a recording will be released

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[jp7189]

Can't say I'm a huge AI fan... but I did download an app recently and posted a pic of my new motorcycle with the comment "Roast my bike in one paragraph" and I was falling out of my chair laughing. Good stuff.



I have a couple 2.5 8TB SSDs and a 12TB HDD. All 3 are backups of the same data. I guess the only thing I'm doing wrong is they are all hooked up to the same power supply?

I wasn't thinking of a LLM AI, although I guess that's where the public mind share lies. AI today is a fantastic probability engine. Feed incomplete data have it fill in the blanks. E.g. stable diffusion starts with completely random pixels and creates a coherent image guided by a text prompt. Signal analysis and data recovery work similarly.


I would run fast and far from SSDs as backup media. Standard HDDs are far superior for longevity. Also, there's not a lot to gain by having multiple copies in the same location. Store at least one copy in a different location. Friend's house, bank safe deposit, etc. Just make sure to update it from time to time.

 

[DavidC1]

We’ve even seen a startup working on archival glass storage that it claims could last 5,000 years.

Oh right. People can barely live 1/50th of that and they predict it'll definitely last that long somehow.

I guess in the current climate you have to hype it to an unrealistic degree to get investors, practically lying.

We'll see when the tech arrives whether it even lasts 20 years, nevermind 5,000. There are only things time will solve.

 

[Johndoe85]

While I think your comment was meant to be snarky, it is true that AI is fantastic at filling it missing gaps. If these drives had media errors it is likely AI could help. Not so much for a completely lost drive.

How was his comment ment to be snarky? 😕

 

[jp7189]

How was his comment ment to be snarky? 😕

I took it that way because of the ongoing angst of artists worried that AI is ripping off their work. However, right now AI can't duplicate original works very well. What you end up with is akin to a charicture artist creating a work that resembles a person while being goofy at the same time.

 

[rumburak]

I just recently got a bluray burner to transfer some old data from CDs and DVDs. Crazy how it will all fit onto a single 25GB bluray. I remember back in the day getting dual layer DVDs to maximize storage.

Viable option if only data on those DVDs or CDs were not protected from copying

 

[Heiro78]

Viable option if only data on those DVDs or CDs were not protected from copying

I wrote the data so it's not protected

 

[User3434]

The article said that the failed hard drives were completely dead, despite them having been used very rarely and being stored in archival conditions. To me, that implies that the drives failed not due to the degradation of the magnetic fields on the disks, but rather due to manufacturing quality defects, because it sounds like the spin motors simply refused to work. That can happen, for example, if the seal on the lubricants in the motor were faulty, allowing the lubricants to dry out. Another possible cause is if subpar components were used in the control circuit board, allowing them to abnormally degrade over time and cause the board to completely fail to work, preventing the spin motor from running..

If the spin motors had worked, the hard drives would not have been completely dead, but rather would have still spun and allowed at least some of the data to be read, if not all. I read some technical papers a while back that stated that the magnetic disks in the hard drives should be able to retain data for well over 10 years due to how the data are magnetically recorded. To give you an idea, it requires a very strong industrial magnet held up against the hard drive to damage the data. Your run-of-the-mill toy or refrigerator magnets are not strong enough to cause any damage to the data stored on the disks. Still, since there is no way to predict how reliable the mechanical and electrical parts of the hard drives are, you should take additional actions, such as storing the important files in multiple drives made by different manufacturers, to reduce the risk of losing data due to a failure of any one hard drive.

It also helps to store the files only in the hard drives that have had good reliability track records. Google, for example, has released data on which hard drive manufacturers produce the most reliable drives, based on the the failure rates of the drives it uses in its data centers around the world.

Personally, I have hard drives from well over 20 years ago that are still running like champs. But I also backed up the files that are on those drives that I want to keep, since I have no way of knowing when those drives will start showing signs of degradation.

 

[spongiemaster]

This article is very low on substance. What is a bricked hard drive? As the previous poster stated, that typically means a spindle motor issue or some other mechanical problem that prevents the drive from functioning properly. It certainly wouldn't be surprising to find mechanical issues with hard drives that have sat around for 30 years and were never used. In most cases the platters are probably still fine and 100% of the data can be recovered. There is no mention in the linked article about media degradation where the actual data stored on the platters is lost.

 

[USAFRet]

Personally, I have hard drives from well over 20 years ago that are still running like champs. But I also backed up the files that are on those drives that I want to keep, since I have no way of knowing when those drives will start showing signs of degradation.

I have some as well.
Others, though, that died in less than a year.