On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 05:30 -0500, gene heskett
wrote:
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.
Ok, my 40MB SCSI Seagate for the Atari is ok for more than 20 years,
heavy usage, several startups a day. Sometimes I need to start it 2 or 3
times, but than it's ok.
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?
For analog tapes Dirk Brauner had Telefunken machines that are as old as
you are and they were better than a lot of modern machines ;).
Perhaps they were a little bit younger, but you ;). IIRC they did use
transistors.
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.