From: Jesse G. <je...@wi...> - 2004-02-05 17:54:35
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Alan Brown wrote: > On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Jesse Guardiani wrote: > >> > Put some disks in the data safe for 12 months, then see how readable >> > they are afterwards - or if they spin up at all. >> >> Hmmm... I'll admit that I've never tried that before. Why would a disk >> drive fail after 12 months of inactivity? They last a lot longer than >> that when they're spinning all the time... > > They're not being moved around either. > > Disks are more fragile than eggs. :) > I've had a number fail after being > transported following extended operations (1-2 years spinning in racks), > despite having been fully tested before packing them I think that you'd want to go with laptop hard disks if you intend to move them frequently. I have a 32G laptop drive in a firewire enclosure that works great. I take it with me every day. The price isn't nearly as good (still better than SCSI, I think), but they have a lot of advantages over tape media. Random access, encryption possibilities ( http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf ), higher portability (my Firewire enclosure has a USB port too, so if I'm using a Fat32 file system I can read the backup on any machine, not just a machine with a tape drive), etc... Tape is still probably better when it comes to shelf life, but I haven't had any trouble from my 2.5" drive yet. -- Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator WingNET Internet Services, P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605 423-559-LINK (v) 423-559-5145 (f) http://www.wingnet.net |