On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 13:14 -0500, Josh Fisher wrote: > > Agreed. I would not expect a drive to be readable if you sit it on a > > shelf for 10 years. It probably would not spin up unless you kept it > > in a humidity protected environment. > > > > All media fails in the long run. It is just a matter of how often you > have to refresh the long term storage.
Magnetic domains deteriorate over time due to thermal agitation of the molecules, stray magnetic fields, etc. The bearings in the drive are probably okay for ten years or so in storage, but I would wonder whether the lubricating fluids would be stable that long. Also, there is the question of whether the drive interfaces will still be supportable in a decade. If you had an old MFM or RLL drive from the 1980s or early 1990s today, you'd play hell trying to find a controller. If you had a controller, you'd play hell trying to find an ISA bus machine to plug it into. Long-term archiving is a tough and complex problem, unfortunately. Scott -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scott D. COURTNEY, Principal Engineer Sine Nomine Associates scourt...@sinenomine.net http://www.sinenomine.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
