Comments on: Larry Jordan’s Hard Drive Warning!

By: Vince

Vince — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:40:11 +0000

That is the professional advice from Steve Gibson, the creator of Spinrite.

Spinrite reads and rewrites all the data on any drive or drive partition it operates on. Gibson highly encourages people to run Spinrite routinely, in order to refresh data that’s sitting dormant on a drive and rarely accessed. He claims the data fades over time unless it’s refreshed periodically.

Although I’m not totally sure that it happens, I suspect it does. The higher the frequency used for recording on magnetic material, the less it penetrates into the surface and the weaker the resulting magnetic orientation becomes. Modern drives already rely heavily on amplification to read the very weakly recorded data on the very thin film and it doesn’t take much to demagnetize the stored signal.

While I can’t see READING the data doing any good, defragging and relocating/rewriting the data certainly would refresh it. Older drives with lower density were “punched” a lot harder on recording than the modern ultra-high density drives. (Vertical recording -where the magnetic poles are set upright on the surface instead of laying end-to-end ….. probably helps the fade problem quite a bit, but still ….)

I was hoping to find some corroboration for Gibson’s claims from other drive specialists but have found nothing except for Larry Jordan’s article. I don’t especially trust Jordon’s word because I don’t believe there’s any evidence to back up his claim that drives refresh THEMSELVES during normal usage and/or that reading the data does anything to re-strengthen it.

By: Gene Genoar

Gene Genoar — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:03:10 +0000

In my experience as a magnetic media source-code librarian, PC tech, and general data-junkie, magnetic digital data can be expected to die within 5 years. This is because the signal is held on a little magnetic particle that is constantly vibrating in the magnetic field of the Earth and many other outside forces such as clocks, monitors, and house wiring, as well as the many other neighboring particles on the disk, which will have adjacent positive and negative orientations.

I am suspicious of the claim that data is automatically refreshed on a drive left powered up. I believe that to refresh at least most drives, the data must be read and re-written by an outside process such as imaging the drive and re-cloning it, or software such as SpinRite that refreshes by reading and writing. Just copying the files off and back onto the drive is good, but doesn’t refresh the basic partition, allocation tables, and directory structures.

Of course, I could be wrong.

By: Allan White

Allan White — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:59:10 +0000

@ Matt: We use CatDV as the “app that automatically catalogs contents of hard drives on the shelf, includes an offline searchable database of the filenames/metadata in those files”. Plug it in, it scans the files (they have a capture app for scanning tapes called Live Capture), creates previews (I make SD-res H.264 mp4s), and then metadata can be added. We have a whole team adding clips & info via their CatDV Server product.

FCP Server does this to a degree, but we’ve found CatDV to be more flexible. http://www.squarebox.co.uk/

As to the “remind me to refresh drives” bit, I could see that being an applescript or cron (once a year) notice. I suppose we could use CatDV’s “Play all clips as sequence” to play through every clip. Is that needed, or just a spin-up?

By: Darren Shroeger

Darren Shroeger — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:34:36 +0000

What is the consensus on using DVD-R’s for solid state media backup? I have heard shelf-life figures from 2 years to 300 years. That’s quite a range!

http://digg.com/tech_news/CD-R_s_DVD-R_s_could_last_only_2_years
http://digitalcontentproducer.com/videoencodvd/revfeat/Archival_DVDs_Good_as_Gold090905/

By: Larry Jordan says Don’t Let That Hard Drive Sit! at FreshDV

Larry Jordan says Don’t Let That Hard Drive Sit! at FreshDV — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:20:09 +0000

[...] Are you using hard disks to backup your fancy new solid-state camcorder? Are you letting the archives sit on the shelf? FCP guru Larry Jordan says that new info suggests you shouldn’t let the drives sit too long, lest your data evaporate. Scott Simmons has the scoop. [...]

By: Dylan Reeve

Dylan Reeve — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:47:28 +0000

I have had drives sitting in a box for years that work too – but don’t rely on it.

I also had a SCSI drive running 24/7 for just under 10 years as well. That was cool. Was fine until the power failed, and then it just didn’t spin up again… Hard drives are curious things.

By: editblog-admin

editblog-admin — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:27:28 +0000

What’s the brand on that 7 year old drive Mike? I think we all might want to get one!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:26:39 +0000

I have an old Mac plus wiith an HD on it and I fired it up after 7 years and it ran fine.

By: Earl Newton.com » Hard Drives Aren’t Forever

Earl Newton.com » Hard Drives Aren’t Forever — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:18:05 +0000

[...] a very disturbing article at LarryJordan.biz, courtesy of The Editblog: Magnetic signals recorded on a hard disk are designed to be refreshed periodically. If your hard [...]

By: Dylan Reeve

Dylan Reeve — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:22:46 +0000

I think realistically the lifespan of data on harddrives is probably longer than that, but that’s a safe number I reckon. I raised this issue about two-years ago at a P2 presentation with Barry Green – seeking then (and still) a good solution for inexpensive and simple data storage.

Optimally, for harddrive based storage the drives should be kept ‘online’ in an active state. In my case I’ve just built an OpenFiler NAS server for my soon-to-be-former workplace. Fairly inexpensive, relatively easy to maintain.

I’d be interested to know exactly what level of disk access is required to keep the drive ‘fresh’ – I’d have expected something like a defrag or similar block optimisation would be required.