17 Dec
2010
17 Dec
'10
11:30 a.m.
On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:15:04 am Philipp Überbacher did opine:
[...]
I guess it really depends on what you try to achieve.
Afaik the average
life-span of a HD is puny 2 years.
Some maybe. I have a 1Gb seacrate hawk I use on a TRS-80 Color Computer
that is a good 15 years old, and I hooked up an old Quantum P40S beside it
the other day that must be close to 18 years old. No bad sectors were
found when I did a logical verify of the surface.
From what I heard the magnetic tapes
used by for example ESA a long time ago have a life-span of 80 years. If
'store it good and forget' is what you're after then tape seems like a
good idea.
That seems to be a recipe for disaster. Will there be a working tape drive
to read those old tapes in even 40 years? Here, I use 4 1Tb drives as
individual drives, 3 of which have individual installs on them, and the 4th
is for amanda, doing nightly backups of whatever install I am running this
year. With smartd running, I have been told far enough in advance of an
impending drive failure that my email corpus has not been lost since early
2002.
As for my university, as far as I know they use some
RAID system for
everyday and tapes for sensitive data. And they already had their whole
RAID fail at the same time.
So have I observed. Twice that I know of at my former, and occasionally
still, employers.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't,
and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.