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I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a

I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a chance in a decade or so SATA ports disappear, but USB adapters still work. Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? ZIP drives had a number of mechanical issues (click of death). That's probably the biggest reason why they're challenging to try and use today. But as it stands right now, I can take a CD-ROM drive from the 90s, use a cheap USB adapter, and plug it in to a USB port on a brand-new Linux or Windows or MacOS device without issue. And even then, so what. In 25 years when I'm an old man I'll need to plug in my last optical drive into my 8 year old computer to read the disks and move that data off into the four dimensional hypercrystal storage mediums we'll all be using, and then I'll go into my cryogenic storage chamber to sleep for another 100 years and then transfer my data to the next media format when I wake.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.
- vel0city 3y ago
  A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges. > It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk. I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced? I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot. I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording. I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Did you actually validate every bit was exactly right on the drive? Did you even have the information to validate that data? Not just that they booted up without a noticeable error, but that every bit was exactly as written 25 years ago? How many drives did you test, how many manufacturers? Most of the bits will probably be fine. Some of them probably won't be. The rate depends on a myriad of factors. Even within a brand different models will be better or worse, and it's not exactly a metric you'll find listed. And then yes the way they're stored is also a factor and even the environment when the data was written. I've had drives from the 80s still work and still pretty much have all the data. I've had files get corrupted on modern drives with no other explanation than bitrot. Even just cosmic rays can eventually flip some bits.
      - saltcured 3y ago
        Fair enough, I did not have checksums to compare. And I only randomly sampled the contents, not every single file. But yes, it booted and every program I tried executed normally and every data file I inspected seemed valid. I do have some familiarity with how such old systems would misbehave with corrupt data, such as from bad data cables. I didn't see any of those kinds of symptoms and so do not think there was any significant storage decay from being on the shelf at least 5x longer than the 5 year interval mentioned up thread. I tend to think that such a failing drive must have had some other kind of damage and not just some kind of spontaneous demagnetization

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.

vel0city 3y ago
A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges. > It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk. I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced? I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.
- saltcured 3y ago
  Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot. I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording. I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Did you actually validate every bit was exactly right on the drive? Did you even have the information to validate that data? Not just that they booted up without a noticeable error, but that every bit was exactly as written 25 years ago? How many drives did you test, how many manufacturers? Most of the bits will probably be fine. Some of them probably won't be. The rate depends on a myriad of factors. Even within a brand different models will be better or worse, and it's not exactly a metric you'll find listed. And then yes the way they're stored is also a factor and even the environment when the data was written. I've had drives from the 80s still work and still pretty much have all the data. I've had files get corrupted on modern drives with no other explanation than bitrot. Even just cosmic rays can eventually flip some bits.
    - saltcured 3y ago
      Fair enough, I did not have checksums to compare. And I only randomly sampled the contents, not every single file. But yes, it booted and every program I tried executed normally and every data file I inspected seemed valid. I do have some familiarity with how such old systems would misbehave with corrupt data, such as from bad data cables. I didn't see any of those kinds of symptoms and so do not think there was any significant storage decay from being on the shelf at least 5x longer than the 5 year interval mentioned up thread. I tend to think that such a failing drive must have had some other kind of damage and not just some kind of spontaneous demagnetization