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| Thread ID: 127147 | 2012-10-06 21:21:00 | Half life of data stored on a magnetic drive | ssssss (2100) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1305519 | 2012-10-06 21:21:00 | I read somewhere that this is about 6 years. I am not sure what this means, but it sounds worrying. How long is it before reading a drive starts giving errors? Thanks |
ssssss (2100) | ||
| 1305520 | 2012-10-06 21:32:00 | I nearly lost a CD of pictures that started to become unreadable after 5 Years, your much better off using a portable hard drive for storage | gary67 (56) | ||
| 1305521 | 2012-10-06 21:36:00 | I nearly lost a CD of pictures that started to become unreadable after 5 Years, your much better off using a portable hard drive for storage Hi gary67, Aren't some brands of CDs and DVDs better than others? I usually stick to Imation. |
ssssss (2100) | ||
| 1305522 | 2012-10-06 22:28:00 | Imation is garbage. Practically all optical media in NZ is off the bottom rung of the production ladder. Taiyo Yuden is reportedly a very reliable brand (dunno if I spelt it right), but you can never be sure if you're buying the genuine product or some cheap asian knock-off of the TY brand... so it's still a gamble. Discs branded Sony may be made by Princo, which is notoriously foul media. Essentially you can't trust anything to do with optical media at all. Not even the stuff you buy from trusted stores. Totally agree with Gary, that your best bet is an external hard drive. The trick to a longer service life from it is to keep it out of service as much as possible. ie when you don't need to be using it, disconnect it from power and from the computer, and put it away somewhere safe, away from vibrations, magnets and kids. I actually keep two drives like this, so if one fails, there's a good chance the other is still good. If / when you inevitably find a drive has failed your immediate priority becomes getting a replacement drive and completly copying your other drive BEFORE making any further use of it. |
Paul.Cov (425) | ||
| 1305523 | 2012-10-06 22:57:00 | back it up into the cloud, for instance www.skydrive.com gives you 7GB for free, or 25GB for free if you were one of the early customers | nmercer (3899) | ||
| 1305524 | 2012-10-06 23:48:00 | Thanks for the advice. When you say optical discs are poor, does that mean that commercial DVDs, like BBC video DVDs have a poor life too? |
ssssss (2100) | ||
| 1305525 | 2012-10-07 01:42:00 | half life? this isn't a radioactive substance. | Slankydudl (16687) | ||
| 1305526 | 2012-10-07 01:48:00 | Nooo. | ChazTheGeek (16619) | ||
| 1305527 | 2012-10-07 02:01:00 | half life? this isn't a radioactive substance. It's the length of time it takes for a substance to decay to exactly half it's original mass/size/whatever you want to call it. |
icow (15313) | ||
| 1305528 | 2012-10-07 02:25:00 | Thanks for the advice. When you say optical discs are poor, does that mean that commercial DVDs, like BBC video DVDs have a poor life too? Commercial DVDs etc are much more reliable than most CD\DVD-R etc but the reflective layer will still rot after a while, faster if there is a manufacturing defect. But remember, everything breaks, to keep your data safe have multiple copies\backups and be sure to refresh your devices periodically to combat degradation of the physical media. There is also the issue of silent corruption which has multiple causes, one way to combat this is a filesystem designed to combat this such as ZFS which implements data scrubbing and checksumming. |
Agent_24 (57) | ||
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