On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 05:30 -0500, gene heskett
wrote:
On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:15:04 am Philipp
�berbacher 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 ;).
I'll have to call you on that one, Ralf. It was some of your folks that
invented the wire recorder in about '38 or '39, and the coated paper tape
was sometime in the later 40's. I was born in '34.