[linux-audio-user] Re: Digital Fidelity

[Dan Mills]

On 28 Feb 2006, at 11:44, Carlo Capocasa wrote:
>
>> Have any of you audio folks encountered mutlipass erasure thing on  
>> your
>> audio files yet?
>
> What the??? I thought hard drives were reliable, at least more  
> reliable
> than CDs. Thanks for educating me here. Uh... So how would an engineer
> know it's time to re-load the hard drive?
>
> And if this is true, wouldn't a program loaded from that hard drive
> crash and burn the entire IT department?
>
> Or is this something that only happens when a drive is continuously
> accessed over months?

Don't forget that video servers (of the serious sort used for this  
stuff) tend to run with lots of the drives normal firmware disabled -  
thermal recalibration springs to mind as does things like on the fly  
remapping of bad sectors.

You would be amazed what a hard drive manufacturer will do in the way  
of custom programming when you are Probel and buy big SCSI disks by  
the tens of thousands.

Some of this might effect the long term reliability (as a tradeoff  
for more predictable performance), for that usage it is a reasonable  
call.

Regards, Dan.