On 2013-06-14 10:01, Randy Little wrote: > I don't KNOW how long they last I just know that un powered they start to > de magnetize some last a long long time some don't. Most do but they > aren't considered archival storage. > > http://www.larryjordan.biz/hard-disk-warning/ > > Thats all I can find right now. > > My Brother is a senior hardware engineer at Cisco I'll ask him what he > knows. There are things that raise warning flags for me. The references to "just reading" refreshing things is one of them, that's nonsense (but, I think, what they really mean is that it detects weak sectors and then the disk hardware plus OS filesystem code then steps in and fixes it; that's probably correct), also that "Older mainframe storage systems continuously read each sector", that's definitely not true. Well, not true on the old mainframe systems I've worked on, but I think those are older than he's thinking of, maybe the HBA disks did start doing that or something. His sources seem good, so while I'm picking at the details, the overall message is probably good (and isn't THAT surprising). They've been making the magnetic domains smaller and smaller for a long time. (Also, CISCO is one of the lest disk-oriented companies out there, they make small and large routers, which are built to run continuously and don't store data, and mostly don't even have hard drives in them.) -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
