[LINK] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Rick Welykochy]

Stilgherrian wrote:

> 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?

I dug this up but have not read it in detail:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

It would be interesting to know the lifetime of HDD media. Similar
to mag tape, perhaps? If the mechanism of a drive failed, there is
still the possibility of extracting the data from the media using
another mechanism. But once the media fails, that's it.


cheers
rickw



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Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

aibohphobia  -  the fear of palindromes