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Magnetic HDDs do suffer bit rot, yes. But perhaps more importantly the mechanisms suffer physical failure over time. You can't just pop the platters into a new
by mystified5016 2y ago
Magnetic HDDs do suffer bit rot, yes. But perhaps more importantly the mechanisms suffer physical failure over time. You can't just pop the platters into a new drive, even if you had an identical model.
That's really the main disadvantage of hard drives: the media is permanently coupled to the drive. If your tape drive fails, you can just pop the tape into a working drive and still get your data back.
- quesera 2y ago> You can't just pop the platters into a new drive, even if you had an identical model It's certainly inconvenient, but this is my untested understanding of how drive recovery services can work.
- qingcharles 2y agoWith older drives, pre-about-2010 I think, you can, as I understand it. After that they added little NVRAM chips to the boards which hold data about the disk, so you need to make sure they match. I just fried a HDD controller with a bad SATA cable, so I'm having to switch the chip from one board to another to try to recover the data.
- hilbert42 2y agoOh dear, here we're talking about age deterioration. Swapping media as a solution only works if the remanence hasn't decayed below the recoverable threshold.
- hilbert42 2y agoAll magnetic media suffers bit rot by remanence decay (a natural analog phenomenon). It's just that tape by virtue of its construction and type of recording process has better data (S/N) margins (its storage longevity is better).