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Twenty percent of hard drives used for long-term music storage in the 90s have failed
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.
Not for long term archival they didn't. HDDs and SSDs suffer from bitrot among other issues when they haven't been powered and/or refreshed in awhile.
Tape is still king for long term archival, just about every major company uses it for the long term archival of critical data.
They may also use cloud archival services, because when it comes to backups if you don't have multiple across multiple mediums and multiple places, you don't have a backup.
Tape suffers from bit rot too. Radiation doesn't target just HDDs and SSDs. Look, I don't know what to tell you. I deal with a lot of large companies and I lived through tape's hayday. The cost to archive data on disk is not high and companies don't have issues doing it. Having it on disk prevents bit rot, because the pools are massive and are auto-healing. Also, the only way that your archive is not going to be long term is if humaity ends. Seriously, what do you think it would take to destroy a multi-AZ glacier archive?
Ultrium media has a lifetime of 30 years after the first write to the cartridge, and that's assuming you write to it up to the maximum number of full writes (260).
Assuming you write to your cartridges once, store them (and the drive) in an airtight dustproof box, and don't expose them to extreme temperature or humidity, you're pretty much guaranteed to have complete data integrity after the 30 year mark.
At that point, you can probably transfer all the data into your petascale holographic storage installed at the base of your skull.
They aren't talking about availability. This is about data integrity over time.
Which is higher on an active disk pool with auto-healing.
Sure if we're powering every drive. For long term shelf stable backups, it's still tape.