On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) <lop...@nedharvey.com> wrote: >> From: tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org [mailto:tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org] >> On Behalf Of Doug Hughes >> >> LTO, Ultrium/IBM, and >> StorageTek have a published archival life of 30. > > If they publish a spec, that's something you can work with (and I would > venture a guess, probably good enough to satisfy Bill's original request for > statistics.) > > It turns out, searching for "archive hard drive" produces a result - WD > produces a "WD Ae Datacenter Archive HD" WD600VF4PZ, "The WD Ae is best > suited for cold storage, backup and data archiving where data is stored on > disk but rarely if almost never read again" > > But so far I haven't found any published spec about data longevity.
I'm not sure a device that comes with a 3 year limited warranty is really going to be interesting for my suggested use case. See bottom of last page in: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/2178-800087.pdf That isn't any longer than typical warranties for actively used disk drives. If anything, this is a signal that using disks for offline storage is a bad idea. BTW, I want to thank everyone who responded to my original question. Lots of new ways to think about the topic. One thing, I learned when I looked more carefully at LTO tapes is that they quote different rates for uncorrectable vs. undetectable errors. Uncorrectable are like 10^3 better then disks, while undetectable are like 10^13 better. In scenarios involving multiple copies, this would seem to be significant. Unfortunately though, it seems like nothing other then anecdotal data is available for longevity of offline disk drives. Oh, well... Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
