Don't Trust Snakes: Hard-drive reliability

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“I know where I'm headed.”

ROGER THORNHILL

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Hard-drive reliability

You will find a very interesting "White Paper" on hard drive reliability and backing up here. Since we all rely on hard drives these days, it's valuable to understand a few things about hard drive and enclosure reliability.

Something that's beyond the scope of the "White Paper" is that it's a poor bet to rely on recordable DVDs or CDs for backup. These fail far more often than most people realize. I've had several recordable CDs fail. They are in no way robust like commercial pre-recorded CDs. Recordable CDs have a very thin plastic layer over the data surface, which is easily breached. Once that happens, the surface can oxidize, corrupting the data structure.

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