[LINK] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Stilgherrian]

On 06/04/2010, at 10:58 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> I found an article in New Scientist (30 Jan 2010) on a subject we have  
> discussed before here.  How long our mounting cloud of digital data  
> will last.  Compared with say Babylonian cuniform tablets from 3500  
> years ago the answer is not long.   They have a chart:
> Flash memory: 10 Years
> Magnetic tape: about 20 years
> Rewritable CDs and DVDs: 7 years
> Most CD-R and DVD+R, DVD-R, audio CD and Movie DVDs: 26 years
> Special gold CD-R: 100 years
> Hard disks: no-one knows.

I'd have thought that for hard drives the limiting factor wouldn't be the life of the magnetic medium but the mechanical life of the drive. Machines wear out. and "no-one knows"? I thought the mean time until failure for HDDs would be pretty well known by now -- and it'd be in a single digit of years. Can anyone confirm?

Stil


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