-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 05/24/07 18:58, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 06:08:21PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > > >>> There is something to be said for casting something in plain text in >>> bronze and gold plating it. >> Buffered lignin-free paper. >> > > Burns. > > Bronze melts. > > Pottery breaks. > > Acid rain eats granite. > > I guess the bottom line is that information that is not used is > eventually lost. It must be taught always to new generations, either > people or hardware/software. > > Hard drives have spare sectors and reassign when sectors become > degraded; they 'teach' a new sector the information from an old sector. > If the drive is on the shelf, we have to spin it up and get the drive to > test all sectors. When enough sectors get bad, SMART tells us so we can > "teach" a new drive the old drive's data. > > Data is never maintenance-free. > > I know, Ron, I'm preaching to the choir.
A once-a-year spin-up, fsck and "unzip -t" (of compressed tarballs) would be darned useful. Externally-enclosed hard drives won't need to worry about whether they are SATA or IDE, but if USB ever goes away, it's time to migrate to a modern external drive. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGVjx2S9HxQb37XmcRAhYkAJ9URAbnSDet7qRGv8b+FXxMrcspHQCeMQHW +pRsYUAUeu7+uwBfFKbvUiU= =NT8n -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
