17 Dec
2010
17 Dec
'10
11:41 a.m.
On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 05:30 -0500, gene heskett wrote:
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 ;).
On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:15:04 am Philipp
Überbacher did opine:
[...]
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.
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.