Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying "roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/ - ThreadSky

swiftonsecurity.com • 69 days ago

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying

"roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

Comments

quijohn.bsky.social•69 days ago

Once again people with any data stored anywhere need to be asked: ok fine, you had a backup strategy, do you have a restore policy? That you’ve tested??

callmarcus.bsky.social•69 days ago

Does that mean they are paying back the royalties we had to pay to get them (for any purpose)?

stevereadsydney.bsky.social•69 days ago

There are tech solutions available that automate the “copy, review, keep copying approach” to decouple/allow the refresh of hardware e.g. object-based storage but costs are typically prohibitive for anything other than high-value content.

thomasfuchs.at•69 days ago

I'm seeing about the same failure rate with my retrocomputing hobby. 1980s hard disks are even worse.

thetechknight.bsky.social•69 days ago

Yeah, that tracks. A lot of those HDDs have firmware, geometry information and other bits in the negative areas below track 0 that if they fade/become unreadable the drive looses its mind during self-test. Even the venerable Seagate ST-225 has this same data. Such a shame too.

genesismachines.bsky.social•69 days ago

I'm guessing the limiting factor is how long the firmware can survive on the EPROM without power.

stevenbock.me•69 days ago

I've seen some IG videos about data recovery shops being able to remove the HDD platters and transplant them onto a working drive assembly - including using custom firmware or even custom EPROM controllers to get it working again.

genesismachines.bsky.social•68 days ago

I only need to do this if the bearings or read heads have failed. It is far safer to swap circuit boards and leave the platters in the protective housing.

accidentalciso.net•69 days ago

Did they get a good deal on Deskstars back then or what?

sdschap.bsky.social•69 days ago

And that’s why everyone who works in backup/archive would categorically never say HDDs, SSDs, CR-r/DVD-r etc are an archive medium. They might work 20years later, but also very well might not. Furthermore one disk working after 20years doesn’t mean they all will… That’s confirmation bias…

bbdd333.bsky.social•69 days ago

Back in HDD days, I never worried too much about drives that stayed on 24/7. We had more HDD failures when machines were turned off for service, stopping the drives and letting them sit and cool down, than we did on live spinning drives.

nxcv.bsky.social•69 days ago

Sorta like how incandescent lightbulbs that are near EOL always seem to die right when you turn em on.

b1gdill.bsky.social•69 days ago

Just throw em on a .torrent.

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