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I think you're making the improper assumption that the drives would need to be left on during this entire time. I don't believe they would. I don't know if the
by ahlatimer 16y ago
I think you're making the improper assumption that the drives would need to be left on during this entire time. I don't believe they would.
I don't know if the bits eventually lose their magnetism over time, so if they do, you may need to spin up the drives every so often and copy to and from drives to make sure the data is still "fresh", but I seriously doubt they'd need to be left on and spinning for the entire 50 year span.
- barrkel 16y agoI'm not assuming that the disks are spinning all the time; I don't know what the failure rates of drives left unpowered are, so I took the spinning rate instead. Google search suggests that failure rates for unpowered hard drives is high - sticking heads etc. - and as drives are not designed for this, probably higher than powered drives.
- lsc 16y agothis is also what I've read. Also, anecdotally, I've had a disproportionate number of drives fail on power-up.