https://www.extremetech.com/computing/hard-drives-from-the-1990s-are-failing-says-data-archival-firm

Maybe this is a stupid, uninformed take or I'm misunderstanding what the article is saying... but anyone keeping data on hard drives from the 90s does not have any business being in charge of storing data. Do they not have enough redundancy to prevent data loss? Are they not monitoring drive status and actively replacing drives that are failing? Seems like an entirely preventable issue. Music labels have boatloads of cash and if they arent spending enough of it on data backups or archival then it's their own damn fault. Full disclosure I skimmed the article so maybe I missed something important. But my main takeaway was... people are using 20 year old hard drives and seem surprised that they are failing? 

I would imagine that the lubricant used on the spindles has hardened which prevents the spindle motor from being able to spin the platters up.  Exercising the hard drive by periodically spinning up the drive may prevent this from happening.  Any mechanical device that moves will eventually seize up without periodical movement of all its moving parts whether it is a steam engine or a pocket watch.

More common in drives of that era is the rubber damper for the head actuator end stop degrading and turning into sticky goo, then the actuator isn't strong enough to free itself from it. Fixed a few drives with that issue. 

 

 

@Kilrah, thanks for another failure mode from inactivity.

 

I just now recall an experience with a 10 or 20MB hard drive (that size is correct!!!) back in the early 1990's.  It became so slow in spinning up to speed (hardening of the lubricant) that it would not be ready when the BIOS went looking for it to start loading the OS.  My solution was to do a complete read/write check of every byte of memory (640KB) as a part of the BIOS startup process.  That took long enough that when the BIOS did go looking for the hard drive, it would be ready.  (Replacement of the drive was about $400 back then...)

On 9/18/2024 at 7:15 PM, 2Piececombo said:

people are using 20 year old hard drives and seem surprised that they are failing? 

I hate to break it to you, but 20 years ago was 2004. 🤯 I feel old.

On 12/4/2024 at 5:06 PM, Frank1940 said:

@Kilrah, thanks for another failure mode from inactivity.

 

I just now recall an experience with a 10 or 20MB hard drive (that size is correct!!!) back in the early 1990's.  It became so slow in spinning up to speed (hardening of the lubricant) that it would not be ready when the BIOS went looking for it to start loading the OS.  My solution was to do a complete read/write check of every byte of memory (640KB) as a part of the BIOS startup process.  That took long enough that when the BIOS did go looking for the hard drive, it would be ready.  (Replacement of the drive was about $400 back then...)

 

Yup.  My first XT computer didn't have a hard drive and then the next one did, 20MB.  Come to think of it, it ran for a long time, into the early 2000's and then I gave it to a computer museum.

Ah, the old IBM PC X/T.  When I got out of college, I had a PC X/T with an expansion chassis - Another full size IBM PC chassis, with a 20mm+ thick cable to connect the two via ISA expansion cards.  Had a full height 5.25" 10MB hard drive in it.  We (Vermont Microsystems) designed and built the Professional Graphics Controller for IBM, and I had one for testing in that expansion chassis.   All very high end hardware for the mid-1980's.

 

My boss had a pre-release engineering model of the IBM PC A/T.  8MHz 80286 and a 40MB half height HD.  A config IBM never offered.  We were all amazed how much storage space that was.

 

Fast forward a decade, and no one expected a HD to last more than 10 years, even if kept in cold storage.  Hard disk drives are not an archive medium.